The other day I was walking through the store- (I think it must have been last Thursday, becasue I was at the store with a client in Sandpoint); and as I passed a case full of cookies with brightly colored frosting on them this thought came to me: I am unloved. There is nobody: family, lover, or otherwise. It stood out spare and bleak as against a flat featureless landscape, a plain fact. I looked at it as if from far away, as if from another person, and the thought was as though it were happening to someone else and I was unmoved....it was like coming across the corpse of something lying alongside the road- you look at it for a moment, you say to yourself, "It is dead" and the reality being what it is, you resume walking.

It sounds rather surreal, and that's the way it felt....

But I think it's probably true. There are people who *need* me, people who *want* me for whatever reason, people who like me, people who find me useful or beneficial to them in some way, there are people who feel a sort of duty towards me, and above all, people who try hard to go through life being kind and good natured towards everyone, so of course they're nice to me. :shrug: But love? I don't think so.

I think it's possible to love someone _and_ to need, want or find them useful, but if you can't love them without that, then it isn't love.