Whoops.

I just wanted to say that I'm sorry I dropped it.

Rules are slippery things. They can get out of hand quite easily.
I just hadn't predicted it would shatter.
I hadn't predicted it would make such a sound.

But if you didn't want it broken,

wouldn't you have caught it on the way down?

tentative

"How many friends would you say you have?"

"Well...I don't know. Are you my friend?"

"Would it be presumptuous to think so?"




"No."

attachment

i have recently found myself attached to various objects of affection.

kind of in the way one would find themselves attached to coffee, or cocaine. or hugs.

are hugs addictive?

can you overdose on tension-calming tea? like, how many tea packets would it take?

...wouldn't you just fall asleep?

it's a fairly lonely business. getting attached to things.

sometimes you can't really pull yourself off.

and when you do, it hurts. like a band-aid. one of those huge ones you had when you scraped open your whole shin as a little kid and it ripped off every little hair all at once when you finally took it off.

i wish people didn't assume things. it's just bad publicity, you know.

i wish i didn't have the memory that i do. forget to tell somebody they got a phone call, remember the exact look in the exact face of the exact someone while they said exactly the something they didn't even mean.

getting attached to things doesn't work out for anybody.

no matter the theory, no matter teh time.

are you ashamed yet? i wish you would be. it's been a while now, and you still haven't left. isn't it strange? the whole sticking-around bit? it ought not to be, but you know how things get.

happiness is a fleeting thing.

i'm tired tonight. i'm tired of night, tired of the fact that there aren't any stars left in the city because how do we know they're still there in the dark? tiny baby spiders crawl around as i paint and i don't want to kill them but i do. is it any worse to end a life before it is started? before mistakes are made, before people are bitten and bugs are killed?

it's just bad publicity, you know.

"You scare me," he said.
"I scare myself."
"Good."
"Hey, you weren't the one in my lap."
"Good."
"You know the staple remover holder?"
"Yeah?"
"You can use it as a holster and tie it to your belt loop and pretend it's a loaded weapon."
"NO WAY, REALLY?!"

"You scare me," they said.

honesty is one of the most important things in the world, and is something that most have long forgotten. more important than starlight. have they forgotten starlight too? oh dear.

i believe in the natural organization of thought the way some people believe in natural food growth, or natural childbirth. as something just much too meaningful to be forgotten.

there are some things i am very good about hiding. you, for instance. also most people can't tell when i'm nervous or afraid. i don't try to hide it. maybe it's just a reflex, to hide fear. you never can tell, really. some people stick around. and sometimes they hurt you.

but everything else, if you're anyone with observation abilities, is easily read. happiness and anger and all. except love. some people can't see that. pain. pain too. love and pain, those ones i try, but people's ears are closed. numbed with the absence of the stars.

i miss the stars.

a selfish part of me wants to leave it at that and go to sleep. but then you'd worry, won't you? ah, yes. people who stick around often worry. tis a good thing, he would say. tis a good thing. but, don't worry for tonight. i'll probably read through in the morning, after pouring coffee and changing my mind, without even knowing who it is i am talking to and why i never pressed the shift bar.

joy is just within sight.

we can see in the dark.

Miserable Person

I was sitting in the second row of a roller coaster, as a lonely-looking amusement park employee stood at the gears and shouted the rules as loud and emotionless as he could.

"WELCOME TO THE DRAGON, PLEASE KEEP NOTHING UNDER YOUR FEET, YOU MAY NOT PUT YOUR HANDS OUT OF THE RIDE, BUT YOU MAY, OF COURSE, PUT THEM IN THE AIR. ARE YOU READY?"

"YEAH!" everybody shouted.

"Yes, sir," I responded quietly.

He scoffed, looking at me. "Well you're a miserable person."

Then he pulled the lever.

The Loophole in the Loophole in the Theory

Myths about what happens in the realm of lost love have spread around the world for centuries.

Some say it turns to poetry, forging itself into words with wings and then flitting off to battle the mind of someone brave enough to catch them.

Some think it seeps deep beneath the earth, becoming the colors that grow out of the ground. Others say it floats high above the earth, becoming the wisps of clouds that grow out of the sky.

Still others believe it is the music in the air, unhearable to all but those brave enough to listen. These brave ones hold butterfly nets and bug catchers, leaping for the notes before they reach the sky and make their way, as they always do, into the mouth of a songbird.

But scientifically, this is not possible.

Art is only made up of the ash left after the candle burns out. And the artists themselves, illogical by nature, believe that they can touch it.

It takes a person entirely more special to reach the bottom realm.

Neither creator nor forager nor scientist, these people, growing rarer and rarer with each passing songbird, have something working that should be broken. The gears in the factory of their hearts are turning, where others shelve poetry and cobwebs.

These people are, according to science, mutants of the species. Their hearts are warm from the turning of gears, the spinning of wool, the recreating of what is lost.

They can actually pick up these pieces of such strong, selfless, sorry love that were never received. They pick them up off the ground and carry them in their pockets. They fill their factories with shells and their factories make new ones. They take one heart and make two, three, five, ten more.

It makes no sense. The lab was stuttering under the weight of such factless truth. The findings, however, are not arguable.

These people have what is, for lack of a more appropriate word, unlimited love.

Logic has nothing to say on the matter.

What they do, you see, is they make all this love and it just shines out of them. Like they're a star or something. And they go around handing it out on the streets; like how some vendors sell apples, or bread, they sell love. And they don't even SELL IT, they just GIVE IT AWAY like it's NOTHING, all of this love free to the world.

They return the hearts full to those empty.

The mutants have been battled, yes. Hearts ripped apart with swords of hate, infiltrated with bitterness, sawed in two with doubt. But it makes no difference - their abnormality is stronger than ours. It's like their factories are surrounded with steel walls, armies of guards and dragons and bridges. It's open to the public, sure, but we can't open it with a crowbar. It's like the unrequitedness of the whole thing doesn't touch them. You take their love, they earn it back themselves, like these terrible powerful monsters full of good intentions and honest hearts.

It's been noticed that these ones' hearts work harder than the others. They work fantastically hard. And never do they even tire out.

It makes no sense.

None of it does.

The loophole in the loophole does, however, answer the one and only question remaining - Why? 

Why ever even transfer that love? You can keep it in. Keep your supply. Not risk getting trapped in the disease of giving without receiving, get stuck fallen without any loophole to revive you. Why in the world would you go through with the trade?

We stared at each other in blank plastic goggles. We coughed on the scent of formaldehyde and played with the buttons on our lab coats.

None of us had the answer.

But the loophole does. Find one - ask them. Search for someone searching the ground for empty bottles, someone who smiles at a frown and holds hands with strangers. They will carry a yellow notebook full of robot drawings. They will ask you if it's a swan.

It will not be a swan - it will be a duck. The duck will not be able to fly.

The loophole should be frightening - you should not approach such ones. But you want to. They draw you towards them, make the stuck gears in your heart shake and stumble, as if unlimited love is contagious. As if maybe the few left in the loophole may never die out.

And then your heart sputters alive like a dying diesel engine, and it coughs and groans under the weight of so much time spent alone and you grow to be one of the loopholes. You grow to be hated by the philosophic, scientific, artistic, logistic, and mathematistic communities. You proved your own theories wrong.

So, yes, I guess love can be a limited resource. Congratulations. It just takes more work from our hearts is all, work very few are willing to give. If you are one of those few, then, well, you proved me wrong. And if I hadn't gotten so near the test subjects I probably would say I hate you for putting me out of a job and everything.

Except that I don't.



SIDENOTE: ((This theory was originally created to make fun of science and logic except then I had to follow up and make fun of art and stupidity too so now I guess the whole idea behind this three-part sarcastic rant is to just be a really nice, loving person and stuff? I don't know. I'm kind of really bad at reading my own writing, so, I might just move on after this and talk about pickles and Elmer and roller coasters. Yep.))

(((Also I don't know how anyone would ever use any of this but it'd probably be a good idea to say copyright 2013 all rights reserved THIS THEORY IS PATENTED ALSO I'M REALLY SCARY GOOD AT INTERNET STALKING SO IF YOU TAKE IT I'LL PROBABLY FIND YOU.)))

A Loophole in the Theory

There has been a new discovery.

This is the idea that maybe the actual human heart

is different than this kind of heart.

This goes along with the first law of thermodynamics, which my father so kindly reminded me of today, which states that energy, along with everything else in the universe, cannot be created or destroyed, but can only be changed.

Which is true, of course. Except that this theory would prove right any self-assuming emotional lovers out there who honestly believe in their pretty little hearts and souls that love is an unlimited resource.

Which it isn't.

Because, see, there's a loophole.

This loophole is where love can escape the energy transfer and fall away - not to nothing, but to a state that cannot, with today's science, be collected or altered.

This loophole is the idea of unrequited love.

Now, a normal love transfer would look like this:

One side has taken out a piece of his love and sent it into someone else. He is negative one piece of love. But then, he gets an equal piece of love in return, from the side he has sent his love to, so his heart can be complete and rejuvenated to its original state of fullness. Each gives and receives an equal amount.

A classic energy transfer. Of course, if this were what always happens, the amount of love on Earth would stay at its original level for eternity. But it doesn't.

Why?

A crack in the system happens.

The crack in the system looks like this:

WHOOPS. Transfer FAILED.

Where does it go though? What happens to that love? Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be changed. If so, what does it become?

Unable to be received, the love joins a realm unreachable. It loses its energy to move into a body, and instead finds itself to be, well, gone. Off the map. Not created or destroyed, just changed into something we cannot yet retrieve or contain. Or, well, find.

This would be fine, of course, if it weren't for the people who send this irretrievable love and what happens to them.

A strange phenomenon occurs.

The sender, observing their love is unable to be accepted by a body already full of its own unsent love, should logically move on, reserving their limited amount of love for a better recipient.

Somehow, this does not happen.

The unloved, realizing itself to be unloved, does something remarkable and entirely inexplicable - 

it keeps loving.

We cannot tell you why or how this happens. Unrequited love is such a powerful energy source, we can't get near enough to the test subjects to ask them when they're empty. All we know is that love in its most selfless form can and will result in a death unloved.

Unless.

Unless someone reaches the unreachable.


It happens every now and then. One of those things that can't be helped. No one knows just how or why, but there are some people able to retrieve this vast ocean of lost emotion. They just put it back together piece by piece.

They are the loophole in the loophole in the system.

Without them, we'd have run out a long, long time ago.

The Limited Resource Theory

So there was this raccoon book I read when I was little.

It was about this baby raccoon and his mother raccoon, and every day the mother raccoon would kiss his hand and it made him feel all happy and loved and junk. Then this random jerk baby raccoon shows up and the mother raccoon gives him a hand-kiss too, and the first raccoon is like "what the junk?! That was my kiss and now I have no kiss and no one loves me and my life is over." And he goes through this like raccoon puberty where he's all goth and hateful and the mother raccoon is like "No, you stupid raccoon, love doesn't work that way. Stop being such an idiot." And the raccoon gets over it.

But I think the mother raccoon was wrong.

Here's the question I'm asking - Is love a limited resource?

Everyone I've asked has said it isn't. A mother raccoon can love two baby raccoons. They can both get hand kisses. Sure. But here's what I say - what if she keeps having baby raccoons? What if she ends up with ten? Twenty? A hundred? A billion? One billion hand kisses? I don't think she could pull it off. Ain't nobody got enough love in their heart for a billion kisses.

Here is a diagram of a pie.

It is made up of mass and volume and grams. And cherries. I hate cherry pie. Let's make it cherry.

Now here is a diagram of the pie cut up into pieces.

Seven people get pie. Then you run out of flour and lard and cherries and that's what you got so y'all better deal with it. Right? Now here is a human heart.

Okay maybe a human heart doesn't exactly look like that. I don't know. I hate research.

But anyways, when we split the human heart into pieces like a pie here's what we have:

(There are only six pieces this time. Whoops. My bad.) So you divide your love into parts. You love this person, and this person, and this person, in different ways and different levels. Blood and flesh and little flappy things all cut up and passed around. Beautiful, isn't it?

Beautiful.

It's not like you could ever love more than six people. Logically, it's just not possible.

So obviously love is not an unlimited resource. It's not like you can go devoting your heart to every person on the planet. Of course, you can reserve a piece of it for the idea of the entire population. You could say you love humans in general or whatever. Be one of those people. But I mean come on raccoon, after a while you're going to run out of kisses.

That is why, after much thought and research, this small discovery has been made: 

According to logic, love will collectively one day run out. Just like the oil in the earth and the gas in the sun. The stars will blink out and the water will run dry and the last piece of love will, some time in the next billion kisses, be unrequitedly spent.

So, when asked openly why I try not to be loved:

But, just like how we're still using fossil fuels and the sun is still shining, no matter how correct this scientific theory is, it won't change what happens. 

And even though love will inevitably blink out of existence, 

we can't help but disappoint each other.

Legs

"There's just a few ... blemishes."

"Ugh. Those are mosquito bites."

He was wearing my crocs and I was wearing his sandals. For the first time, his shoes were too big for me. Also they were very uncomfortable. They were very uncomfortable sandals.

"What do you do wrong then?"

"I don't know, I guess I'm just incapable of shaving my legs without it looking like I've been hacked at with a battle ax."

"I could shave for you."

The definition of awkward silence followed. I mean the complete dictionary definition. With footnotes.

"...I'm sure you could, Elmer. I'm sure you could."