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They say that love is blind, and I've certainly seen my share of both love and blindness. It's amazing how often they coincide. They also say that love is a beautiful thing, that it brings so much joy. Well, that I haven't seen. What I have seen is only pain, uncertainty, anger, and too many tears all coming from love. Hell, I've never even seen a happy couple. Every pair of sweethearts, spouses, and otherwise significant others I've ever known have never really been happy. They're always doubting the other, doubting themselves, crying themselves to sleep, fighting, yelling, and growing grey hairs until they finally call it quits. Yup, love is beautiful alright. Beautifully painful. Beautiful devious. Beautifully terrible. It is the great opiate of the masses, the gnawing addiction that drives us to the brink of insanity and ruin. It beats us down until we are a shell, and like a whipped puppy we come crawling back without our tails between our legs, eager to suffer again. It is a splinter perpetually twisting in our hearts, one that we can never heal from. One we can never be rid of. It is our prison and our paradise. Our heaven and our hell. For the briefest of moments we feel love's warm embrace, only to fall back into the cold oblivion that comes afterward. Why is it that we continue to torment ourselves? Why can we not break free of our own bonds to live in calm, peaceful detachment?

I've thought and thought and thought, and the only guess I can venture is that it is simple human nature. We are destructive by our very instinct, driven to annihilate out of fear and anger. It is this same nature that prevents real love from coming into this world. We are flawed, our own flaws made painfully apparent. We seek in another person our own perfection, someone who corrects our inner mistakes and makes us feel whole. That cannot happen, because everyone else is just as imperfect as you or I. On the rarest of occasions we find someone whom we could be truly happy with, but our fear drives us away. We have all been hurt before, but that person was not right for us. It is easy to cleanse our systems of a bad relationship. But when the faint possibility of real love is laid at our feet, we turn and run. Is it not easier to turn away from heaven, than to taste it and risk losing the best thing that could ever happen to us? I don't know. I'm not the expert. But I have seen it; people run from their knight in shining armor into the arms of an executioner. They are used to pain, so they seek it out because it is familiar, even comforting in its own warped way.

To be completely in love is not something foreign to me, but to have that returned is not something I have seen. Always the greatest love is one sided, and doomed to remain that way. I have seen it in my friends, old and young. I have seen it in my family. I have seen it in the mirror. I have seen people pine for years over someone they know will never return their feelings. This is a simple path because it means you cannot be hurt. This person will never love you back, so they cannot hurt you any more than your hurt yourself by obsessing over them. I walked that same road once... never again. The truth is we're afraid of it. Afraid to love wholly, because we risk being completely broken by it. We safeguard ourselves with lies and secrets, creating the breakups and the pain that we so fear. Reality is ours to mold, and we don't even realize how much damage we do by trying to protect ourselves. We placed the thorn in our own hearts. We twist it day by day. And we are the ones who will let the healing begin.