On Love

There’s a quote about love, that most mysterious of human emotions, that I’ve come across that seems to be apt for how I’ve been feeling recently. It’s from a British author named Neil Gaiman, and it is as follows: "Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love". I’m beginning to think that he hit the nail on the head with those words. Love is something that when it works out the way you would like it to, not even morphine can beat, but as is more often the case, things don’t go quite as well as you might like. What is it that lets us give so much of ourselves over, to vest so much of our well being in the whims of another, someone who may or may not be worthy of such a tragic responsibility? This emotion can give you the highest high, but like many drugs, it can at times be unrivaled in the agony, the misery, the absolute unrelenting torture that it can bring to bear on some unlucky fool caught fast in its grip. Love has caused me to lie awake all night, my thoughts racing from one awful thing to another. It has caused me to be able to do nothing else than lay curled up in the darkness crying, with a hollow, empty feeling that’s almost too hard to bear. Love that doesn’t work out the way I wanted it to has caused me in the past to go hungry for days, solely because eating didn’t cross my mind. Love’s such an awful thing, I wish I could go without it, and without the pain that inevitably follows behind it, but I still haven’t given up all hope that someday, things may work out, and while there’s still that little bit of hope, I must continue trudging my way through life, until I collapse under the weight of the world, or love finds a way to work out.