Love

Love is addicting. We turn and push, pull and protect, give out and shell in all for a single purpose: to be loved. It's often quite futile, really, the lengths our hearts go to procure the smallest moments of being held, being delighted in, being desired, being touched. Not even the riskiest entrepeneur would face the business odds of such an industry of deep need with optimism. It would be madness. All the striving and squirming, all the words on the end of our fishing rods cost much more than what I have referred to them as before; moments.

Maybe it's because of the momuntariness, the transience of such conquest. Such moments are short lived almost by definition, at the least in their nature. We will either change, or we will simply become acqauinted to the point where we wish we would change. Even more temporarily, she will need to go, he will need to go. Morning will come, or some interruption will precede it. The circumstances which we may have painstakingly arranged to cultivate the harvest of someone's love change just like the actual havest will. There is always a timer. We rarely, if ever, attempt to pull the word forever out of the fairytale land vocabulary from which we use it.

I guess then, the more incredible part is that we live for the transience we know will not last. Many don't truly desire to build, but want to excavate, extract, and end the digging. The dirt in which we toil means little more than dirt. The tools which we used are easily replaceable. The whole self becomes replaceable, down payment in exchange for the character we might need to become, the things we might need to be interested in, or the people whose company we may need to enjoy, in order to woo someone. In order to drink from the well they have either temptingly concealed, or have run dry by lending to the previous and previous pursuit that is mirrored by our own.

What of our character has the ability to withstand what we ask it to do when we drive it to the far reaches of the desert, attempting to conceal our true thoughts and bury our convictions? When we swallow our hard-won lessons and deny that which our experience has clearly convinced us of before? When we abuse our strengths to feed what will eventually rob us of them?

I'm sitting in Starbucks, listening to some half-unknown singer-songwriter slowly croon the words, "love is wanting to be loved." Within the context, it couldn't be less true. Wanting to be loved is nothing more than the natural craving we have all initially opened our eyes with. It takes nothing to want. It takes nothing to need. We have never known anything other than such an instinct as to desire love. It's built in.