• Love.

    It's everywhere, unescapable, in your face, everywhere.

    The media portray it as a wonderful thing, and what kind of person are you if you have no interest in it?

    I, myself, have tried to step back, to seep into the shadows of disregarding it, of discarding it, to look for something better, more permanent and less dangerous than love.

    It didn't work. Are humans so programmed, so pushed, by the desire to be accepted by someone else? Are we really so co-dependent, or has society made us this way?

    I've dealt with solitude. It both terrifies and comforts me. Love just plain terrifies me.

    Did you know that the brain reacts in a very similar way to love and terror?

    How stressful must love be, to send your blood rushing, your heart pumping. How anticlimatic must it be for the fireworks they describe in harlequin novels to be the simple wet warmth of another's bacteria.

    Yet I crave it.

    I crave the companionship I have thus far been isolated from. I crave hand holding, the wet warmth of someone else's bacteria, the companionship.

    Regardless of gender. Pansexuality gives you an open mind and an open heart.

    I don't want to want it. I want to be an island, a rock, etc etc, you know the rest.

    But I think I'm nearing it.

    I'm nearing opportunity for requited love - or infatuation, at least - because I can't miss the signs.

    I don't want it.

    I really like him.

    I can't want it.

    It would break the walls, which I painstakingly built around me. It would obliterate my rock, my island.

    Oh, to be stronger. To love the isolation, to embrace the freedom of solitude.

    To find every relationship platonic.

    Yet the only thing which society looks at in such a naive way, the only thing shed in a positive light nowadays, has trailed, casually, like ivy, up my walls. It has spun around my rock. It has grown over my island.

    Is this monochrome, this good-bad feeling, this terror, this hope, this melancholy,

    is this what they call love, as undeveloped as it is as of now?