Do You Even Want Love?

You asked that question so callously.

Did you consider that want and deserve are two separate conditions?

Consider that as much as I, with grabby hands like a baby, want it, crave it like plants crave nitrogen, will continue to watch it fall through short, stubby fingers.

Watch the best impression of catching water in a colander.

Consider that to deserve love, you have to have an established worth? A value to which someone looks at you and sees that what you offer is what they are mentally, emotionally and physically are willing to spend on the concept of your love.

How many are willing to spend time and money on free?

When offered or given something free or of little value, how is it treated?

Expendable?

Nothing was spent so if it is defective, it costs nothing.

Easy to part with.

Easy to part with.

Easy to drop in a trash bin with no concern.

No lingering thoughts.

No “Maybe I can fix it.”

No “If I change the battery…”

No “It was free, but I really liked it. I'm okay that it isn't fully functional.”

“You just want sex! Do you even want someone to love you?”

Why want what doesn't want me?

Why try and hype up what is a feeling?

A surge of bodily released chemicals and hormones that cause the side effects of:

Being too stupid to say hi

Being too clumsy to steady shaking hands

Feeling of a heart trying to carve away from behind rib bones, muscles, fat, and cartilage... For what?

Their person walked in?

Looked at them...?

Smiled in their general direction...?

That one comment on a fall Sunday in the dim light pale gray walls...

One comment in response to a teasing observation.

And attraction at surface is fine, but not warranted for love...

Everybody finds love in the end... Or so the lyrics say

That four-line conversation

Less than 60 seconds long,

Shred thread bear self-esteem desperately clutched like a fraying rope over racing rapids.

Gouge out warmth from a flickering ember. Each change in wind speed threatens is very existence.

Four lines in less than 60 seconds... Exponentially long to savagely create a track to play on repeat.

More than enough to ensure the damage is done.

But…

It wasn't enough!

Not enough to rip the delicate strings holding together a glass heart.

No. Never enough...

“She doesn't need to have anything! She doesn't have the common sense to raise shit.”

Spoken in anger right?

How much do you believe?

How much has been lurking in the background like an understudy?

Lurking in wait, looking, begging for the chance to steal the attention?

Basking in the love so fickle it abandoned the prima ballerina...?

It took one comment to cement the action on repeat.

Make me doubt everything in my chest and validate my own emotions and very spirit with a comment so made up of less than thirty words.

A comment that stole one minute from your borrowed breaths.

Yet, lives in my head rent-free.

A squatter to my fragile, impulsive sanity held together with glue sticks from the dollar store and glue tabs use to hold debit cards to flimsy paper.

It pays no tax for the space it inhabits.

Has no claim to the barely functioning structure there.

But it is there.

A homewrecking moocher

A hobo riding aboard my train of thought

Even as it derails and visits the rabbit holes abundant, It holds on and stays there like elevator music.

Even as the words “Everybody find love in the end” tries to give out gold stars.

A poor attempt at rewarding self depreciating failure.

A flagrant reminder that I have to find it.

Anti-heroic champion to a cause then nobody stands behind.

A concept steeped in hormone transactions and perceived concepts.

And here I am with a questionably suspect endocrine system.

This is a hunt that I have to take on even as those words rattle in my head.

Words shaping my future like modeling clay in the hands of a preschooler.

Words that didn't even take enough time to pop popcorn on a commercial break.

Words that were hatefully sown like seeds of discord awaiting tears to begin the growing and flowering of their doubt.

I have to find something rare...

A real damn unicorn whose horn can erase these hurts.

Chart the course of these navigational nightmares and redirect them.

Use them to show my sails as a decree to my self wrought enemies?!

My determination?

No.

I will use them to declare a war on my ineptitude.

Lay siege to the mentally conjured vestiges of those who dared to challenge my desire to be loved and love.

Stand worth to find the person that was meant for me.

And with that battle laying upon the horizon where sun dips into celestial expanse,

Where your voice picks those words and hurls them to the lyrical stylings of an out of tune banjo,

I will search; make sure to prove you wrong if nothing more than to see myself give a genuine smile in the reflection of glass.

Feel my face flush like embarrassed teens to the person who earned my love and found me deserving of theirs.

If nothing more than to answer your callous and hateful question,

"Yes, More than anything."