It's anything but simple..

I try to think back to a time when my views on love were simple.
I try to remember how it felt to trust someone whole-heartedly.
I devote my minds wanderings to thinking of a way to take it all back to the beginning.
Maybe before I knew what it was. Maybe before I'd ever felt it.
Just so that I could know what it felt like to experience again.
Not that I haven't, or won't again. But, I think everytime you fall in love, it becomes harder to genuinely do it again.
Because every mistake or regret from the time (or times) before, loingers over you.
You focus your energy on trying to make it better. Easier.
And, what you end up doing is trying to take a cookie cutter and forming your own ideal version of the most raw and uncontrollable emotion.
I think that's why they say the first love is the one you will always remember the most.
It's the only one that, is really completely natural.
You don't know what you're doing. What's ahead. It's an amazingly, frightening experience.

Over time, and experiences, I've lost my simplistic views.
While I still hold onto my ideas that love is something that you fight for, that you want and need, it's also true that I don't find it as inviting as before.
I dunno when exactly this change incorporated itself into my livelihood, but I find it there and long for the time when it wasn't.

While I struggled with letting go of love, and loving myself and all those other debacles over the last few months, some of my closest friends found themselves falling in love.

I don't know if it was because I was jealous of them having that feeling and me not, or if I was upset cuz I felt it meant it would be a "the cheese stands alone" kinda thing. For whatever reason I found myself looking for reasons to be irritated with my friends. Maybe just so that my subconscious would feel better if I got mad at them, and stopped talking to them, before they just got too busy for me.

I've never been in a situation where love blossoms around me, and I'm the guy on the other end of it. Scowling at small gestures of affection. Curling my lip at every held hand.
I'll admit that I felt alienated. Uncomfortable. Threatened.
And, I wish I wasn't that guy.
Unfortunately, I can be pretty selfish. Fairly self involved. Extremely over emotional.

In recent days, some of these relationships have ended.
I'm going through so many different feelings. Relief. Sadness.
Excitement that things can go back to what they were.
Acknowledgement. Realizing that things can't go back to how they were.
I want friends who are genuinely happy for me, and I want to be that same friend.
Not a skeptic.

Love has been so, bittersweet for me.
Before it was something I actually went looking for. Forcefully. (not..THAT forcefully.)
Now I find myself more afraid of it.

Coming to terms with this, makes me feel bad for myself.
Add it together with all the things that have been bothering me lately about myself...And I'm wondering who the hell I am?

I seem to have, become everything I set out to never become.
It's kinda weird for me.

I take such an aggressive stance on everything. I wish I could be someone who is more interested in finding amazing things, rather than hiding away from the not so amazing ones.

I guess I'm a classic "the glass is half empty" kinda guy.
I'm just trying to become something different.
And I seem to be out of anything that I can pour into the glass to make it full again.

All in all, I wish that people didn't get hurt.
I wish that the people in my life never experienced heartbreak. I wish that I'd never experienced it either.
It's amazing how the greatest feeling in the world, is also the worst feeling in the world. And, its shocking how quickly it can go from one to the other.

I guess I just advise people this.
Welcome every opportunity. It's better to lose what you've had, than to never have anything.