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 ^{(it's beta!)}

I fell in love, once upon a time, and got my heart broken into a thousand tiny bits. Sometimes you can piece all those bits back together, sometimes you lose something. Once upon a time, I tried filling that hole, and I guess it worked for a little while. However, nothing can replace that original love, that heart shattering love that I once had. And after awhile, I realized those pieces still weren't there, but my heart was working fine and well without them.

Then I realized I had fallen in love all over again. Sometimes the biggest mistakes in life are the ones you never make. And by the time I realized it, it was too late, and he was gone. My heart wasn't shattered again, but it was bruised. A sign got put up, that says "Reserved for future heartbreak." Imagine waking up and realizing you're an emotional masochist.

Not too long ago, a past mistake told me that love isn't a one-way street. It's funny how often we use driving metaphors for love. However, for the record, love can be any kind of street it damn well pleases. Love is truly blind and deaf and dumb. Love doesn't care how you feel or think you feel or how anyone else feels or thinks they feel. Love isn't anything but an intense emotion. If love weren't a one-way street, of what would all the poets and lyricists write?

So, there's this guy. And I definitely love him. But I may or may not be IN love with him. Make any sense? So, you think that after falling in love twice before, and loving an indefinitely sized group of people, I'd be able to figure that one out. I know I thought that. I was obviously sadly mistaken. But there's something comforting about his voice as I'm half-asleep. There's something inviting about the way he touches me, that is familiar, yet completely new to me. There's the fact that all his vices that I've sworn I hated fascinate me. How all his flaws make me smile, and how if he's in the room, I can't take my eyes off him. It's how he tells me not to smoke with a lit cigarette in his hand. It's knowing he's every kind of wrong for me, isn't attracted to me, and wouldn't care that I care but feeling this intensely anyway.

So what's holding me back from saying "Yeah, I'm in love with this guy."? I've been in love twice, at seventeen. Some people don't fall in love twice in their entire lives. So part of me is worried I'm pushing my luck on love. A kind of "three strikes, you're out" thing, and I'm not ready to give up that last chance just yet. There's that piece of me that knows I'm just setting myself up to get hurt. That beyond a reasonable doubt, he will destroy everything I've finally fixed. That piece of me that just wants him to be that mistake I finally had the balls to make.

And part of me, regardless of how unrealistic the thought is, is terrified of being loved. Terrified of having that kind of power, knowing that I don't handle situations like that very well. I tend to destroy things capable of destruction.

And this could all be straight up lust anyway. But I know the difference between love and sex. I know they are exclusive, can and do exist without the other, even if they are often coincidental. Love doesn't cause sex, and sex doesn't cause love. Sometimes they just happen to show up at the same parties.

Fuck, I just don't even know.

If you know who you are, my apologies for not having the balls to tell you this. But really, how would you tell someone that you may or may not be in love with them? You'll be one of my favorite mistakes, if I can be a mistake of yours.

So here's to mistakes, and the boys who help me make them. Here's to mistakes I forgot to make, and to the ones I'll make for the rest of my life. Here's to love and sex and everything that falls in between. To cheap alcohol and chain smoking, hot tubs and parked cars in mall parking lots. Here's to infidelity from every side.

I was feeling a little poetic.