6

Emotions are never quantifiable and yet one often will say "I love you so much" or "I hate you so much" and other phrases of the like. It is baffling to feel an abundant amount of one emotion at one time, feel it dwindle and get replaced by others until it goes away and yet there is no measure of these feelings, no exact figure and often no distinction between one and the other. I cannot know when hope began to leave me, when it returned and when it left again but I know why. I cannot know when love turned to hatred. I cannot know when I ever wished such suffering on another individual. I cannot know when forever ended and never began. We were so sure and we were so wrong. It is a difficult moment, then, when you feel pathetic and you become painfully aware of it: when you sit in that café that you know they go to constantly looking at the door when the bell rings hoping they are there, hoping to see you sitting there; when you intentionally refuse to erase their name so you can stare at it hoping they are staring at it too; when you lose yourself in someone else and pray that they are thinking about you too even if you met in passing; when you dream dreams and hate reality; when you yearn over what never existed; when you want to be someone's crowned goddess. Can I be so egocentric and so helplessly romantic? To be this jealous, this moved, this nostalgic and this hurt over the little innocuous events that truly have little or no meaning what so ever? This is what pathetic is and I keep finding new depths each day. All these things and more are the small wounds you refuse to allow to heal, making the scars that will eventually develop deeper and deeper. And in this torture we realize we have dimension. In this pain we realize we can feel. And all of your hopes and your desires, no matter how daft and silly, mean something in your heart; in your dreams. And when you look to literature, you find that you are not alone. Even if you bury your pain in booze or pills or food or movies, or books or work, it's waiting for you when you close your eyes at night.

It amazes me how life stopped when I thought I was in love. It was, perhaps, that kind of love that creates a faux-Eden; a magical sanctuary that makes one forget life and how it is meant to function. A cloudy paradise on Mount Olympus. We were so sure, with the angst of a fifteen year old, that we had it right and everyone telling us to come down now would one day be proven wrong. It would be us who would be proven wrong. But how can anyone be blamed? How can you tell teenagers that love will wither and die and life will move on? How can you tell teenagers this will be for forever and ask them to set the date? We were just kids. It amazes me still how life goes on. What folly! I had once made a promise that it was the end and I find myself somewhere unexpectedly where never once was and it is not never but it is real and it feels good. And I can only laugh. Life is happening one day at a time. The important things, the silly things, the depressing things, they are all happening one day at a time. I will stop sometimes in the middle of where never once was to take a look around and wonder what my other is doing. At three in the morning lost in the haze of an unexpectedly charming smile I stopped to think of his cold, queen-sized bed and the snoring across the way after a quite night playing with food with Fox News blaring in the background. It did not matter if I was correct or cruel but it was a reminder that life can stop even if it appears as though the years are advancing. That is when joy dies, when relationships die, when people die and we feel like shades passing along the wrong side of the banks waiting for Charon to pick us up so that we might finally go to the Underworld. But my life was going and it felt wonderful, light and airy and all I could do was laugh. How nice life sounds, even in the most gruesome or pathetic of moments, when backed by the soundtrack of laughter.