I would LOVE to tell you...but I just can't...

How do you go about telling someone that you like them without 1) alienating and scaring them to the point of awkwardness; and 2) looking like a complete idiot for assuming that professing or confessing your feelings for said person might realize just make them realize that the feelings are mutual? Why are such acts always accompanied by uncertainty, pain, and, often times, regret? What is it about dangling yourself out there like a worm on a hook, waiting for an eager fish to bite, so difficult for me? Why do I fear wearing my heart on my sleeve so much? Is it really all that bad for other people to be able to read my feelings as easily as one reads the headlines of the paper? Would it be such a shame for her to know just exactly how I feel towards her?

Too often, I feel and presume that I deserve no happiness in this life, that I have not earned the luxury of being happy. I have nothing in my life to warrant such things. I have saved no lives, thwarted no crimes, cured no diseases, made no one smile. If I have done none of these things do I really have the right to tell anyone how I feel? Do I have the right to tell the one individual I would really want to tell exactly how I feel? As I have previously stated, such rights are reserved for those who have earned it, those who, despite the overwhelming odds, have done a service for this world.

Furthermore, if the feelings are not reciprocated or well received, we could have a "falling out" on our hands, one that will neither be pretty nor productive in any way. A friendship would be shattered into so many pieces that it would be near impossible to repair. It would be a labourious task attempting to gather the pieces in order to put them together to form a picture that is broken and unrecognizable beyond belief. Sure, in a few years we might have a semblance of the friendship we once held but it will be nothing more than a shadow of what it once was, what it could have been. And so I ask again, how do you do it? Or, should it ever be done? Maybe not, right? Better to live in ignorance, somewhat happy but safe, than merely exist chanceless...