I have a confession to make.

I am afraid of love. I am afraid of feeling it, trusting it, needing it, enjoying it, and then losing it.
Yet, interestingly enough, I am sensing a change in my opinion. I'm wondering things about love.

Mostly, though, I'm wondering which will come first... My willingness to give love another try, or the person who makes me change my mind. I'm curious! I want to know. I want to learn. I love learning. Maybe it means I'm ready to try... and yet it seems wasteful to be able to love when there is no one around to receive it.

Oh well.

I'm one of those strange people that invest strong emotions into material things. Don't mistake that as my saying I'm materialistic (although I am in a way). Rather, it means, I place all my memories of a certain event into a small object, such as a tube of chapstick, a special shirt, an unfinished bottle of coke, a certain kind of candy, a certain kind of pop.

An example would be my Milk 'n' Cookies flavored Bath and Body Works chapstick. This little baby holds an entire world for me. I'm holding it right now, and it actually takes me to another place, another room, another season, with other feelings. Thoughts, glimpses of a different life, cross my mind. I lost this chapstick, one gorgeous fall night, running through a field with my boyfriend and his/my best friend. It fell out of my pocket when we were thrown to the ground by previously mentioned friends, because they were our bodyguards and we were in grave danger of being shot. They then proceeded to shoot the air with their finger guns. I lost my chapstick, then, and it was too dark, and we couldn't find it.

Funny thing is, next spring we were sitting on a hill in the field, and he gave me my chapstick. He found it in a melted pile of snow. Still intact, still workable. And I'm holding it today, nearly two years later. (I lost it again somewhere in my house.) It reminds me of everything that was, and everything that's changed, and everyone that is no longer. It makes me sad...

But if I lost it again... I would lose those memories, those feelings, the visions that may haunt me, but are still mine, only mine.

Goodbye to you, goodbye to everything I knew. You were the one I loved, the one thing I tried to hold on to...

But I still have that unusually large tube of chapstick.

And I won't lose it again.