To Break or to Hide

This paragraph is an X-ray of Jacob. Someone’s defencelessness normally wakes care; but when tenderness is forbidden inside you and force is the only language you are allowed, both impulses exit through power: destroy — or claim. The middle way, simply being close, requires vulnerability, and vulnerability is exactly what Jacob was never taught to survive.

Notice: both desires are about the same thing. “To break” and “to hide from everyone” both mean “to make mine”. This is not love and not care — it is ownership, in which attraction can no longer be told apart from aggression. This is what closeness looks like in a person who learned that feeling is weakness.