Dear Love,
I've heard a lot about you. My mother says people die for you, claims Shakespeare as her witness, and my father says you're temporary. You've got a reputation for being quite a flake, rarely living up to hundred thousand dollar plans or coming home.
Love, my love, I've heard that you're insufferable. My elders tell me they came to know you once but you ran away, leaving them to be sewn onto the heart carrying sleeve of someone they didn't even know. My grandmother tells me about the first time she met you, you were tall and handsome with a complicated last name and for a while you made her happy. Love, why did you have to make her happy? If you were going to vanish and leave her to hold on to you sixty years later wishing her own husband hadn't existed in lust of you, did you really feel it your right to come in to her life at all?
That's another thing I can't stand about you Love, how you never ask permission. You never ask permission and I find that very rude. When people say they know you, they describe it as "falling", because the damage you do to people can't ever be done to you. When things fall it's inevitable that they break. Who are you trying to break? My sister says you're trying to break her. She rips out the stuffing from her pillows and batters the happy out of her blogs and she's been throwing old photos of you and her into the fire place. Never has fire felt so cold. The world around her shivers and from that cold you left in her, just like ice, she cracks. I for one know that when you decide to impede on how I breathe and who I think about while watching romantic comedies, you can bend and bend and bend me but I will never break because you, Love, can't make me fall. I'm as balanced as an acrobat or cat on a ledge. I'm not weakened by men.
Love, isn't it funny that just by changing one letter of your name, you become "live". You change the 'o' to an 'i' like changing an 'oh' to a 'me' like changing heart break into a 'live for yourself'. What are you trying to tell us? Some say "I can't live without love". Like the letters are humans, adding "i" would mean nothing without you Love. I mean nothing without Love... But of course this kind of picking words apart only applies to the gushy women and men who, below their solid metal exteriors, are nothing but flesh and blood and screwed over balls of emotion. Balls of emotion, a family friend tells me. She told me you'd once taken her statuesque shape and turned her round, having her spinning this way and that, making her dizzy. She tells me that you made her melt and when her layers were melted, there was little left to protect her from the burns in her chest she would get when her Love song played sentimentally on the radio. She'd recite to the hidden pages under her shirt sleeves and to her pen and biology note book, "I can't live without Love". I for one know that you and I, Love, are similar enough that if I can't know you, I'll still probably leave my school books for the pains of memorizing what you and I are physically made up of. You won't cause me pain. If anyone is going to cause me pain, Love, I'll take the liberty of doing it myself.
Love, like anyone, you're just a cleverly assembled product of chemical reactions. But my aunt tells me I'm too young to know you. Is it true? Is there an age limit I should put on you Love? I hear you're more NC-17 than PG-13 but with the amount of warnings that come along at the mention of your name, I've come to think you're more deserving of R. Usually if I stay calm and collected I can easily distract from my baby face and pass the ticket line into the 18+ theatre without a passing glance. But for some reason Love, my aunt calls in my cousin and they sit me down to tell me that you're more dangerous than an itchy trigger finger on a fully loaded gun. More deceptive than the graphically displayed crime theatrics and more traumatic than on screen slaughter. They say you're a horror movie on speed, terrifying with satisfying rush. They both get teary eyed and beg me not to go on the search for you, Love, not knowing that I must do whatever I shouldn't. My aunt tells me you cause rainstorms, brainstorms, heartstorms and lungstorms. She said it's been harder to breathe since she saw you in a hard wooden box, Love. It seems like you've found your escape. Why haven't you returned to her?
