19. Have you ever been in love? Unfortunately.

—LBJ

Well, here we are again.

I used to think that love was only pain. That was when the only expe­ri­ences I had with love were bad, when every­thing I ever felt was unre­quited. The fact that I felt this way was rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the fact that I hadn’t got­ten over those feel­ings at the time. How child­ish, inex­pe­ri­enced, con­fused, imma­ture I was. This feel­ing shaped much of my per­son­al­ity in the last few years, although I’ve recently been able to come out of such an emo­tional blockade.

Having a rela­tion­ship where most feel­ings, how­ever con­fused, how­ever tor­ren­tial, how­ever tem­po­rary, were shared, has allowed me to come to terms with the past. Such an inci­dent has ben­e­fited me greatly, has let me know that I’m not so numb any­more, that it’s pos­si­ble for such a rela­tion­ship to exist even if I may never expe­ri­ence it again. Perhaps I was so scared that I would never fall in love again that any such expe­ri­ence would have shocked me into get­ting over what had hap­pened in the past.

Now I embrace the feel­ing of love, embrace the fact that the sim­ple act of lis­ten­ing to a song can fill me such poignancy, com­pletely regard­less of whether it’s good or bad. Not only do I enjoy being able to care for some­one, I enjoy miss­ing them as well, as dif­fi­cult as it can be. I like the fact that some­thing can turn me ter­ri­bly, illog­i­cally weak. Every emo­tion involved, whether it’s plea­sur­able or painful, fills me with the urge to write, to cre­ate, to express. This is what I look for. This is what I need.

Now only good can come of love.