I am eighteen.
I want to become so many things.
I have never been in love.
Eighteen years of living and never fallen in love. I resent the idea of falling in love—much more with actually falling in love—used to. I always thought that falling in love is one crazy fad that would soon get out of style. Falling in love was like a slice of extremely delicious, mouth-watering, unforgettable, feels-like-heaven-with-every-bite cake that everybody wants to eat. Let me rephrase that. Everybody, and I mean everybody, anticipates for and sometimes desperately wants to devour. Falling in love is crazy. Love is crazier. Someone offers you a drink and you down the martini you’re holding and accept the offer. Comes in some flirting. Exchanging e-mails, landline numbers, mobile numbers, office numbers, and the hell. Then there’s interceding office sex. An unexpected pregnancy. A shotgun wedding and a life of bliss. What more can be crazier than love? I mean, you’re a smart and decent person until you fall in love. Love is practically something people must avoid. Somebody comes into your life and changes everything in it. All of a sudden that somebody leaves you alone, in pain, heart-wrecked, heart-broken, heart-shattered-into-a-million-pieces, heart-half-dead-and-numb, vulnerable—all the suite of defenses that you’ve been building since your first day in your mom’s uterus completely devastated. How can people, everyone from all walks of life, be interested in and signing up for love?
Well, according to my research, love is the best feeling in the entire universe. It makes you happy, over-the-top happy and yeah, happy. You can practically hear your heart beat triple time at the sight of the one you love. Your eyes would sparkle like the tiny diamonds that embellished Cinderella’s perfect dress when in contact with your love’s eyes. You experience this tingling in your toes and butterflies in your tummy feeling—a feeling capable of calling the paramedics for you. You can stay up all day and all night thinking of the one you love and always wanting to be awake because you believe that what’s happening is better than just dreaming. The person you love becomes all that you think about; you think about him/her twenty-four-seven. You think about your love at work, in the mall, everywhere! You think about him/her all the time that sometimes it becomes annoying and blatantly distracting, you know, the I-can’t-remember-if-I-washed-my-hair feeling so chances are you end up washing your hair twice. For the past years that you have been living your life, you listen to all the advices that you can get but you never give absolute importance to any of those advices but in a snap, all that matters now is the opinion of the one you love. Your love’s voice becomes the voice in your head that you can’t seem to drown, actually, you don’t want to drown, that’s unknowingly manipulating you—turning you into the person you weren’t before. Love… what a crazy four-lettered word. Despite its craziness, love becomes the vertex of all the six billion souls roaming the Earth. It becomes the link to each and everyone of us. It is our defining feature—plants can’t love; animals can’t. We realize in a sudden that love is the principal force behind human existence. Love is the soul’s recognition of its counterpart in another, thus you look for that one person who can make you hurt like hell and who can make you laugh like there’s no tomorrow. Love is the thing that keeps us going. Love truly makes the world go ‘round.
Cynicism, in love, has always been a part of me; in fact, it has been me for the last 18 wonderful years. Probably that’s the reason why I haven’t been head-over-heels in love. I’m a simple girl who wants a simple guy—someone with a big smile, a ridiculously handsome face, arrogant-sarcastic-but-changeable-to-romantic wits. I just want somebody to sweep me off my feet. Someone who can scare the crap out of me. Someone who can make me cry but chooses not to. Someone who can’t bring me the moon and the stars and the giant cuddly panda bears but would try to bring me those. I want someone who has the guts to negate everything that I say—someone who can make me speechless. Am I reaching for the stars here? No. N-o. No. Then where the hell is he? What’s taking him so long? Did he die or somethin’? In as much as I would like to rush things here, it would take a load of fate not to, I won’t cram on falling in love. I’m just goin’ to be patient and wait. I will learn the things that I am destined to learn. I will meet him—someday. But for now, it’s waiting time…
