Running. 'What are you running from?' The question haunts her mind, lurking around the corner waiting to catch a stray thought and be carried into the open. 'Running? I'm not running from anything.' She tells herself. She tells the world. Her carefully formed mask giving nothing away. But she's crumbling, with nobody there to help put her back together when she falls. It's her doing. She shut them out. Wouldn't let them have even the slightest of glimpse behind the mask. So there's none even suspicious that she wears a mask. They just believe it is her; blindly trusting in what she shows them.

The real her is long gone. Running from the world, too afraid to let down the walls safely built around her heart. Walls under so much pressure, they threaten to break, come crashing to the ground. 'Just a couple more hours,' she tells herself to be strong. She will not let her walls down around people; never around people.

On she builds, brick by brick, wall by wall, an impenetrable fortress surrounding her heart, her mind. She convinces the world nothing hurts her. She convinces herself nothing hurts her. 'A heart of stone,' some might say. 'Well, if that's what it takes to survive,' she thinks, 'so be it.' So she builds on.

She wears the mask and she builds her walls, not because she lacks the want for love and understanding, but to protect against heartbreak and the fear that nobody understands, nobody loves freely. One must understand to love. 'How can they love someone they don't understand?' she asks herself. 'How can they understand someone who doesn't understand herself? How can they love someone so weak she has to hide behind walls?'

So as the years pass, the walls stay up. If no one gets through them soon, love will become a fantasy, a far off dream, a distant wish she once had, but cannot remember. It will be unable to reach her. A heart of stone she pretends to have and so a heart of stone she will one day carry. She must learn to trust or it will be too late.

It's not a question of love or hate. It's simply her heart telling her she's too late. She built her walls of stone so high and hid behind her mask of indifference for so long that what the world saw became her reality. The walls a prison, the mask her own personal nightmare. 'Is it ever too late to let love in,' she wonders, 'or out?' She will soon find that the hardest part was not building the walls, but instead, tearing them back down.