Over and over again..!

Love is a weird thing, and, as you grow older,
it doesn’t stop getting any weirder
or more complex.
The love you felt for friends and first romances
in high school shifts to a different kind of love
in college, which shifts again as you enter
adulthood. And each time you fall in love,
it will be different, too — you are, after all,
the only thing that stays the same
in each relationship you enter,
no matter how much you think you have a “type”
or that you’re doomed to repeat the same
relationship over and over again.

When you’re in your 20s, though,
there’s a lot that flies up in the air
all at once — you’re juggling a job and debt
and a social life and trying to figure out
who you are, now more than ever,
and some things feel like they slip through
the cracks here and there.
Relationships sometimes seem like more trouble
than they’re worth unless you’re in them
(and sometimes even then, on the bad days),
but that doesn’t mean that you won’t fall in love.
You can try, to avoid it, but it’ll happen.
You can’t outrun falling in love.

 And whatever the outcome — heartbreak
or happiness, forever, or just
that momentary second — it’ll teach you something
about yourself, and about what you do
and don’t want in your life.
Because you need love, and you need
it in multiple forms. But what does it mean to love,
when you can barely juggle your apartment
and your student loans and everything else
in between?
And who do you choose to love?
Do you even choose at all?
(After all, sometimes it’s the love that finds you.)
But those are different questions for a different day.

A complete stranger.
It’ll be the cute guy with the perfect hair
you see on the bus, or the girl
whose carefully-edited Instagram lures you
into thinking you really know who she is,
or the sales rep who you swear always flirts
with you when they make the rounds
to your office. It could be anyone — someone
whose coffee you accidentally grabbed
for at the shop, someone who interacted
with a tweet once, someone who you saw
in a restaurant and imagined a whole future
with in five seconds — only as long as you
keep them at a distance.
This is crucial. You might never see them again,
or you might see them under the circumstances
that you cannot make a move to be something
more.
But you will unload all your craziest fantasies
onto them without their ever knowing,
both because it is less of a burden for you
to carry — all of these goals and no one
to share them with, turns into all these goals
with a make-believe someone else — and because
it is less of a risk. You never have to put your heart
on the line.
You can love from afar.
And even unreciprocated love is real.
But it is not sustainable, and you will have
to give them back their stranger status eventually,
even if you felt like you knew them inside
and out. You never did.
They were never yours to know.
Your idea of them was the only thing you
had a right to love.