Then there's this thing where people say that they love me, win me over, earn my trust.....and then....they change their minds. My mother. Every man I've ever loved. They love me for a while. Or maybe they just like me, who knows. And although it was a shock at first, and it's still always excruciatingly painful, by now it is at least predictable: something changes. I'm not sure what changes. They don't tell me. But the niceness, the tenderness, the sensitivity fades. Sometimes they love someone else instead. Sometimes it just dies for what appears to be no good reason. Most of the time I don't get any answers or explanations at all.

I don't know if I can take it anymore. How many times can a person hope and strive and fight with all their might to keep things alive, only to hear that love is merely a concept, or just meaningless words, or....whatever it takes to explain away the fact that it's fucking gone, AGAIN.

Love isn't meaningless to me. Love is everything. Love is the thing that makes you fight and strive and splash and continue to swim upstream. Loving someone who no longer feels the same way is like trying to plow with a team of horses when one of them has decided to walk off and graze while the other one keeps plowing.

I guess I sound kind of angry....but I'm so tired of the pain. If people are merely enthusiastic, enthralled, infatuated, sexually interested, or whatever, they should use a different word. LOVE is a word that means something. It involves struggle and work and commitment and loyalty. If that's not what people mean when they say it, they should say a different word. :-(

I've come to the conclusion that I don't really know how to be loved.

I know how to love other people. I know how to cry and grieve and pine away for the people I love. Noticing and cherishing all the little details, the nuances, all the tiny things that other people don't see....and hiding them away in my heart's treasure box....I'm very good at that. Keeping the spark or the ghost of a spark alive for years, for decades....I can do that, long past the point where others would have given up hope.

But accepting love....that's a problem. Believing that I'm lovable or good enough to be loved...I don't even know how to get there. I've spent years of my life engaged in unrequited love affairs. When someone wants to love me back, what? What's that? That can't be real. There's a catch somewhere. It's a trick.The pain is coming, I know it. I see the hints of impending heartbreak where others don't. I can smell pain a long ways away....and I'm ready for it, because pain is what I know intimately, deeply. Gut wrenching, mind numbing, crippling pain...I dread it and hate it...but it's oh so familiar and I know how to deal with it. Being loved? I want it more than anything in the whole world...but then when I get it, it's so hard to believe and I have no idea what to do with it. :-/