I am an incredibly unreasonable lover. I love diligently and without moderation, because what makes love if placed within a jurisdiction? The love I am often party to is not that. It isn’t strobe lights and molly; it's washing the dishes after the guests leave. It’s silent resentment, and standing in different rooms, wishing we looked as happy as our married friends from college. It’s facade, knowing if we stay together we’d look forward to a life of contempt and “what ifs,” but being too comfortable together to start over. The chicken we fed our guests reflected in our cold feet. 

I engage in the pipe dream, disillusioned in the maybes. Is there enough time to project? To place yourself into another person, to fall to your knees for their allegiance? In my mind, I tiptoe around the discrepancy, the power anyone can hold with my love. I taint page after page with my depraved words when I know they couldn’t fill a line with something straightforward. I subsist through the logically unwarranted urgency. That “If not now, then when?” 

There comes a time in every starry-eyed lover's trip through the motions when the idea of when feels like never. Incapacitated by the passion to a paralyzing degree. That if not now, if not with whomever, then never. I, as a lover myself, had found myself past adrenaline-riddled invigoration. Abstracted by the last love, the one before that, and the ones I was too slippery to control. Uninterested in the next love or the last love. I haven’t been single for more than three months since the age of twelve. I am consumed by the unfamiliarity of “the who” and restlessly operating under my own goodness: a goodness I scraped my knees up in a pew calling upon in return. I brace myself for a litany every time I take on a new lover because I always find myself loved the same. I am to be loved in an allotment, an allocation of my sentiment to be taken when convenient, when insecure. My vulnerability machinated and hammered into a clay of something once beautiful to the sculptor. I was once something to behold, frayed edges and all, but in this game of love, this game of dominance I always hemmed in, and I am always a willing accomplice. 

I was an insomniac in hibernation, I adjusted myself in the repose of the expected, letting the Sandman kiss me into a trance and disregard the sleepless nights. I was unwaiting and I was unsettled but what kindness was that to myself? I was a star-shaped peg, letting squares, triangles,  and circles try to fit themselves into my breadth; overworked, unmoving. 

After the last love, I told my best friend two weeks later, “This is the first time I haven’t been with anyone, or like romantically interested in someone, or even know if someone is romantically interested in me.” Very poignantly put, I know, but I felt like a sixteenth-century explorer settled down. A torn-up map, a newfound case of nearsightedness, and a sort of relief to stay exactly where I am. To stop searching for the amorphous idea of the maybe. 

Sometimes I feel like I've waited my whole life for the day I get to die. Sometimes I feel like I’ve waited my whole life for the day I won’t want to anymore. I once thought that love would change that for me, naive enough to think that love in itself would keep me alive. My face has been gazed upon by many. It has been held, ooed at, caressed, slapped, and cried on. What lies behind my eyes, which have looked back into many admirers, is something beyond even me. I am ashamed and I am lost; that if I cannot explain it myself who will understand? Who will want to understand? Who will wait for me to understand? Who will watch me explain (I’m sure loquaciously and rambling)? I want to understand the ache in my bones, want to succinctly word the inexplicable, if not for me, then for love. Without a love to look forward to, I live life uncontrollably, I am frenzied, mad and unfettered, unrestrained and open to the unknown.