Love Is...

                  This is the part where you want me to tell you that this is going to be a romantic love story drawn out where I, the main character find the girl of my dreams, the girl out of my league, the girl who I have been pining over for the entirety of my young adult life. The part where I long for her, I work for her, I play the romantic games of cat and mouse, jump through the hoops doused in fire and ultimately get the girl to fall in L-word with me in the end.

                  Cue curtains, roll credits, it’s been great. Thank you, and come again.

                  This is also the part where I tell you that none of that will ever happen. If you clicked on this hoping for me to tell you a romantic story about two star-crossed lovers finally ending up together, well I’m sorry, you wandered on to the wrong site this evening.

                  Because this is not a story about two people falling in love.

                  For full effect, download “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” by Queen, and play at maximum volume throughout the duration of this post.

                  It’s a funny thing, you know? That L-word. It makes people make rash decisions, do stupid things, hold stereos above their heads in 80’s movies in hopes that Huey Lewis and the News will get the girl next door to fall head over heels for you. 

                  Love is emotion.

                  Love is euphoria.

                  Love is elevation.

                  Love is doing stupid things at stupid times for stupid people.

                  Cue Foreigner breaking down on VH1 in 1984 begging the crowds, “I want to know what love is!”

                  I look at the waiter standing like a penned up yak counting down the seconds on the front of his eyelids until his shift is over.

                  “You know on second thought, I’ll just have the pear salad.” She says.

                  Why? Why do we do it? Why do we make dumb decisions? Decisions strictly motivated by a killer instinct or an infatuation. Why do we write songs, and letters, and poems, and hang decorative pictures above our closet doors about the day when two people fell for each other? Why are the plotlines of daytime dramas anchored by this four-letter word? Why are these emotional infatuations at the root of nearly all of our problems? Why do people die for this word? What drives them to want this so badly?

                  Men ache for it, women long for it. People start wars and catastrophes and launch a thousand ships over it. Blind Greek poets write thousands of lines intermingled with death, dishonor, deception and deceitful wooden horses that lead to mass murder, all because of it. This four-letter word, this curse above all curses, the root in the heart of the box from Pandora, this disgusting, foul, self-centered, crisis-causing calamity is something that everyone wants, everyone needs, everyone craves late into the night when they lay in Queen-sized hotel bedrooms in Tacoma all by themselves.  

                  Love is a craving.

                  Love is a longing.

                  Love is cancer.

                  “It’s like, the only real thing I learned from him was that guys can be real jerks, ya know?” she says.

                  I nod my head.

                  “I mean, who sits there and likes a post from their ex right in front of a girl they are taking to dinner?” She says.

                  She looks at me. She looks up and to the right, remembering word for word, scene by scene the moments of that dinner. Conversations like these make me want to shove an extra handful of buttered up oat bread down the back of her throat.

                  It spreads. It infects. To the point of no return. To the point where people make ludicrous decisions. To the point where people bend down on one knee and beg to go the altar wearing the $.16 ring they just pulled out of the Cracker Jack box. Love is a plague that turns good people bad, and bad people worse. Love can’t be cured. Love can’t be fixed. Love is a closet obsession that drives people to madness.

                  Love is cocaine.

                  Love is heroin

                  Love is what Walter White makes in a trailer in Albuquerque.

                  It is an addiction. Once you have it, you want more of it. It is maniacal. It causes you to lose your sanity. You sacrifice things just to have a taste of it. You risk your health, your sleep, your money, your career, your own life just to have a glimpse of it. Love is your obsession that is worth more than the processed drugs junkies snort in back alleyways.

                  Love is intoxication.

                  Love is obsession.

                  Love is desensitization.

                  “There are times that I sit and wonder, ‘why did I spend so many months with him’?” She says.

                  “Months?” I say “How many?”

                  She looks up and to the right again, calculating in her head the moment she was first smitten to the time he broke her heart and asked her to take him back.

                  Again.

                  And again.

                  And again.

                  And again.

                  “Total, it was somewhere around 19 months or something like that, not that I kept track or anything.”

                  “19 months huh?” I say.

                  “Yeah… about that.”

                  “Hmm…how’s your ravioli?”

                  Love is a game.

                  Love is a tactic.

                  Love is dishonest.

                  Love is not true, and I say that because in order to get a girl to fall in love with you in today’s world, in the modern day society, in a world littered with hashtags, to get a girl to be swept off her feet, you must first put yourself into a category more pathetic and ungentlemanly than Kanye West and Pauly Shore combined. The way to get girls is to be a project.

                  “You know, in hindsight, I am really glad we dated for so long. In those 19 short months, I really came to understand who I truly was. And that’s what is really important to me.” She says.

                  “So if he came crawling back to you at this point in time, you wouldn’t take him back?”

                  She pauses.

                  The fact that she didn’t answer before I could complete the question tells me exactly what would happen if her phone vibrated with his face on the screen.

                  “No, I don’t think I would. I...”

                  “You don’t think?”

                  “No, I’m pretty sure I’m past all that.”

                  “You’re pretty sure?”

                  She looks again to the right of the arch in the background. “Enough about him, let’s talk about you. Where do you work?”

                  I raise my hand in defense interrupting the man in the apron’s conversation, signaling I’m ready to hand over my money.

                  Why do women do this in their pecking order? Who knows? Why do high-class gents who have careers, educations, high self-esteems, low debts, good workout routines, clean cars, funny jokes, common courtesy, great ambitions, aromatic cologne, ironed shirts, and clipped fingernails get shut down? Because they are in fact, not projects. And women want nothing to do with a self-dependent creature that will treat them like a queen. They want the grime and filth and abuse that will come in years of frustration, hoping that some day their projects will change into the man they want him to be. 

                   “Thanks so much for dinner.” She says, reaching her arms above my shoulders and pulling me in for the kill. “I had a really fun time tonight.”

                  “Yeah it was great.”

                  “We should really do this again sometime.” She steps back and stares at me in silence waiting for my confirmation.

                  We should, but we won’t.

                  The door shuts behind her as she goes in to check her text messages and verify the project hasn’t called in the last two hours. This girl will go to bed a little less full because she doesn’t have someone to work on. Because she doesn’t have mental disorders to unravel. Because she doesn’t have an abusive prick waiting at her fingertips.

                  You want to talk about love?

                  Love is searching for a yellow umbrella at a train station.

                  Love is a suicidal pact between the children of two conflicting families.

                  Love is never letting go of Jack.

                  Love, is a project.