Black Number Four

by Kandi Steiner

The key to a killer poker face is to strip your soul of all emotion and show only what you purposefully want the other person to see.

Eventually it’s these things that will break me, but right now they’re what make me feel alive.

But remember, some of life’s best experiences are masked as terrifying leaps of faith.

Love doesn’t care about the games we play. It doesn’t care about the rules or the players or what’s at stake. Love is wild and unruly and it does what it wants with our hearts without us having any say in it. It’s beautiful and paralyzing and breathtaking. And it kills us because it’s the only thing that keeps us alive. Love doesn’t play our games because love is a completely different game in and of itself. And in the game of love, when all the chips are on the table, no one emerges unscarred. No one. But sometimes our scars are the most beautiful story tellers.

There are moments in our lives, little tiny specks of time, when everything changes. Moments when everything we thought mattered turn out to be the last things we care about, replaced entirely by something, or someone, we never saw coming.