It’s funny how quickly you disarmed me, how efficiently you breached every tier of self-preservation and unlocked the riddles beneath each illusion, almost as if someone had given you the cheat-sheet to what I thought had been my impenetrable heart. For so long, I was forced to stand as lone sentry to my own frailty, and so I buried it beneath every imaginable trapping of steel and sarcasm and somehow, you've managed to smelt steel and sarcasm alike to reveal a prize so un-beheld, I can barely recognize it anymore. Stranger still are the quiet bursts of elation that light up behind those barricades you scaled so irrefutably, like bonfires to my sanguine surrender.