Big F**king Mood: A New Narrative

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Love is a really funny thing. It's annoying and fickle and just all around excruciatingly painful.

  I think.

  I wouldn't know, I've never actually been in love. At least, I don't think so. See, that's what's so funny about it. You could have fallen in love 10 times in a year. You could have never fallen in love in all the 15 18 20 years you've been alive. All 10 times, that love could have been superficial or fake. Lust instead of love. And maybe those one or two crushes that you've had in your 15 18 20 years that you still remember like it was yesterday was something real. You can give it and take it. You can crave it or hate it. You could be lost in it or you could be drowning in the absence of it. Either way, it's always in your life. In your thoughts, your dreams, your hopes. It's this unseen, inescapable force that inspires countless millions of people to write, to draw, to sing, to act. It drives us all in some way.

  It fills all the gaps in your heart. It can create them too, though. I think love is a lot like fire. It's warm, humans need it to survive. It's beautiful and peaceful. But it's also dangerous, volatile. We fool ourselves into thinking we can control it or contain it, when really, it's a substance beyond our control. Honestly, probably beyond our comprehension. How long had mankind struggled until the discovery of fire? How long have you struggled in your search for love? How long will you struggle? I think that's a question that really scares people. How long until I find someone to love? Until I find someone to love me?

  I'd be lying if I said the idea of it didn't terrify me.

  I don't mean the idea of waiting. Well, I mean, that too of course, but I mean just the idea of loving someone and having them love me back. Love makes people vulnerable. All the time we read or see things on TV about how stupid love can make people. This will probably make you laugh but I'm being 100% serious when I say this, so don't, but even Beyoncé has three songs about what it can do to people. Dangerously In Love, Crazy In Love, Drunk In Love. I mean, I'm happy she and Jay-Z have such a passionate relationship and everything, but seriously? Doesn't that kind of intensity scare you? I'll be honest, it freaks me out a little. God knows I want something like that, but that doesn't mean it doesn't scare the sh*t out of me. It does. It really does, it's one of those things you're afraid to want, you know?

  Doesn't stop you from wanting it though, not really. Not subconsciously.

  Love is....it's consuming. It's everything and it will not be lied to or pushed aside or tricked. And if you have it, you need to be grateful that you've been graced with its presence. That it has deigned to come down from it's throne on Cloud 9 and settle around you and your love for whatever amount of time it feels like being there. Because it will move on, eventually, the way clouds do. It will burn out the way fire does, and we will be left kneeling in its ashes, scrambling for those last few dying embers. Unwilling to let something so amazing-powerful-warm go, even though we know that we cannot capture it in our hands. We cannot hold on to it, not even for a second once it decides to go.

  Then, and only then, with our hands and face and hair covered in the soot of our once true love, will we begin the search for someone so much more concrete than the constantly flickering flame that is the love of our youth. It is that idea, that hope of a love that grounds you instead of lifting you up, that can hurt us most of all.

-   to love