This isn't my usual format. It's not a poem or a story, just a post about the day I decided I would never fall in love. I think I was 19 years old when I made that decision. I told my best friend who would subsequently become my boyfriend that I never wanted to fall in love with anyone. There was no such thing as love, everyone you love leaves. All love ends badly and the very person that loves you the most is often the one to betray you. For me it was too much. I vowed to never be the one who had their heart broken. He just sort of looked at me and asked that I not lose hope completely because love can work out and it could between us if I gave him a chance. He waited for that chance for two years. After a while I was tired of fighting it; I had to be with someone. He was a great person that I trusted. We had so much in common; he was my best friend. But I knew I would never fall in love with him. This was safe. My heart was safe with him.

My notion about love started when I was a little girl. Much like any other little girl, I read fairytales and believed that someday prince charming would come and save me. He would sweep me off my feet and I would be in ecstasy for the rest of my life, happily ever after. But it didn't make sense to me. No one ever seemed to live happily ever after. There were arguments, affairs, drugs, alcohol, deception and just plain boredom. I recall the day my mother told me she had never really loved my father. I was about 10 years old and had just gotten home from school. My mother was kneeling at the foot of her bed praying with the bible open. She cried uncontrollably and asked that I kneel and pray next to her. This is when she told me how unhappy she was. She told me how much she loved my sister and I but despite that her life didn't seem to have any purpose or feeling. She said she thought about dying a lot and she was so afraid. She said she was not in love with my father. After that day she began seeing a therapist. One day she came home and told me that she never was in love with my father. She said she felt like he was her brother. He was a good man and a great father but her life with him was empty. And it made sense from then on why she always spoke of her first boyfriend in Cuba and how much she loved him. He was a womanizer and her parents sent my mother to the US to get away from him. But after twenty years, she loved him still. And from that day forward I realized my father was desperately in love with a woman who would never be his. A woman who stayed out of gratitude, for the sake of the children, because their home life was stable. From that day forward I realized that in a relationship there is always one person who is the sucker. That was my father. And I loved him so much that it broke my heart to think of him in that way. I think that is how I lost all faith in love. I never wanted to be pitied or lied to. When you love someone you are weak. Sometimes you are blind to the truth, yet other times you know exactly what the truth is and overlook it. Love makes people do crazy things. I could not let myself lose control.

So I lived my life like that for several years. I could have done that forever. It was comfortable and safe. I never worried about my heart. I knew it would never be broken. BUt I guess the joke was on me. I foreshadowed my own life. I betrayed the person that loved me the most. But the thing of it was, I couldn't help it. I met someone who turned everything inside of me upside down. I met someone else who made me questions my notions about love. From the moment I saw him, I had no other choice. I was drawn to him; I felt as if I was fulfilling my destiny.
I was for the first time willing to take the risk of heartbreak. It just had to be done.

The saddest part of life is that nothing ever lasts. Nothing good lasts. Everything good in life fades; we hold onto happiness for a fleeting moment. What we are left with is our memories. The most painful ones are of things we have cherished that are no longer ours. I haven't decided what my answer is to the age old question, "Is it better to have loved and lost that to have never loved at all?" I'm still working that one out.