The Patron Saint of Lost Causes

I'm a hopeless romantic to the extreme. I love all those blogs that dedicate themselves to love. I read them for hours as a way to relax.

The funny part of this is I am not in love. I was once and it took everything I had. In fact, I don't even want to be in love again, not really. How could I be when I know what I know?

I know it takes away your choices. Love decides your life for you because you are forever tied to this person without whom you simply could not exist. You lose yourself for the sake of your feeling, for your desire, for your love. And god help you if your love isn't a shared experience. If you're the only one falling, trust me, you will never truly get up. You might convince yourself you did, but always in the back of your head there's the knowledge that nothing's really different...you're just ignoring yourself and your pain.

I know these things, I know the way love cripples, and yet I hope. I hope to again find this insane, life-taking maddness that is love. I desperately want to be swept away in a tide where choice is no longer a reality, and I simply must love the person who has landed in front of me. Except this time...I want them to be swept away with and by me. This time I want it to work.

I fight this part of myself daily. Wanting something so unlikely, so without hope, is insanity. Especially since it's wrecked me already.

So I pretend. I have a significant other. I tell them I love them, and it is true, I do. But here, on these pages, I cannot lie and say it's truly what I want. There is no maddness. No being swept away. It makes perfect sense and we're happy. Not wildly so, but we are happy.

But there in my heart flickers the slightest flame, calling...will you answer me?