Past-me saw the rainbow in the sky...

Love.

2009-me thought it would be a good idea to maintain a diary and also a public blog. The latter was ruthlessly deleted this year but the diaries are still in a box, waiting to embarrass me someday. I loved reading old posts on my blog, only on bad days of course. They reminded me that... life is life. You just have to deal with it. The diaries, they taught me something else. They told me a little secret about love.

It’s easy to love. It’s easy to be loved. But it’s not easy to accept that the person you love doesn’t love you or that you don’t love the person who loves you. If you have experience the latter, you would know how bad it is. Unrequited love is bad when you are the one doing all the loving and it’s worse when you are the one who isn’t returning it. You feel like something inside you is dead. You feel like you committed a crime but someone else is being punished for it.

This post, however, isn’t about unrequited love or how awful love makes you feel. It’s about love. In my life.

I’m skeptical about love, or rather, I’m skeptical about romance. When someone is being nice to me and this turns to flirting, I run. I get away from that person as soon as possible. Don’t get me wrong, I do want to meet someone and spend our own infinity together but as soon as the red light changes to orange and I know green is next, I run. And when I don’t run, it gets worse. I go from loving someone to hating them. I feel this anger in me and I throw it their way and I slam a door in their face.

I don’t know if I do this because I’m afraid of love or because I’m afraid of loving someone.

Anyway, I didn’t always distance myself from love. In 2009, I threw that word around like no man’s business. I used the L-word in nearly every entry. I wrote pages and pages about loving people. And I remember how I used to tell these people I love them. I meant it too.

Now, just six years later, I rarely tell people I love them. And the reason is that, as harsh as it sounds, I don’t love that many people. I love my parents, some of my family members, a few dead people, lots of authors, YouTubers and fictional characters and a handful of friends. So as far as saying ‘I love you’ to people goes, there’re not many options or opportunities, really.

The funny thing is, I’m not sad. I’m not heartbroken that I have no one to love. I’m kind of glad. I’m glad that I loved enough people to last the rest of my youth. And I’m also glad I was this bubbly, sunny, talkative, loving person at some point.

You look back and you think you have to learn from all the mistakes you made. Sure, I cringe at the thought of the way I spelt words and the people I liked back then. Yet, I’m glad I was that person. But I’m also happy that person is part of the past because the people I know now and the people I love now wouldn’t like that person. And more importantly, I wouldn’t like being that person.

2009-me sure has a lot to teach present-me but present-me isn’t ready to correct my mistakes. Maybe five years from now, I’ll stop being this pessimistic girl who doesn’t see the rainbow in the sky but sees the crow who may shit on her head. I have hope that I’ll get there someday... soon. But until then, maybe love and rainbows and unicorns just aren’t meant for me.