So maybe after a while, you lose the sense of wonder when you fall in love. It always comes back again, but never as intense as the first time. Maybe, at that moment, the quilt of our heart ripped and our soul was poured out at some point, but we can view ourselves as half empty or half full. Still, I mend the quilt back together again, every time. Because when you finish it and you see it, you are able to then wrap yourself in the warmth and goodness of your achievement once again. Thinking a bit more deeply recently has made me realize that most people take being alone for granted. Despite it being the most thought provoking state you can be in. Sometimes, enduring it is difficult. But be kind to your body and mind, and know that learning to love yourself is better than anything. Learning to be loved is easy for a lot of people, and for some it is hard to accept. Everybody is different. Everybody. Personally, I enjoy the calm that comes hand in hand with being alone. As an introvert, artist, and a Cancer, I thrive for peace and serenity. It's awful how often people rarely think about the future in realistic terms. On the contrary, I suppose there does have to be a sense of dreamlike wonder to what you imagine your future to hold for you, with reason. Everybody needs hope. I reject the flawed idea that everybody must be unhappy if they are alone. I love the time that my conscience and I spend together. Nobody really understands life in it's entirety. Nobody really, suddenly, honestly "gets it". Having hope where hope is lost is losing sight of your true self. It's losing sight of reality, and everything beautiful around you. You focus on the attachment, the perpetual wanting of a touch, a caress, a kiss, forgetting about everything else. I remember days when I cried endlessly over men. Mortal, living, breathing, learning men. I remember days when I failed to think of the boundaries I had made for myself. For a while, I burnt bridges to be in what most people recognize as love. I neglected friendships, family, and my own self to feel like I had something real. True love is an enigma to the world, however, love does truly exist. Learning how to effectively remain openly loving in a relationship is a puzzle, an endless craft, and an art to perfect. Same goes with all human interaction. It can be boring, embarrassing, terrifying, and unknown. Everybody is blind, and can't see exactly what induces certain emotions at certain times, so be gentle and nurture your fellowships. And remember, love does not judge. I have seen some significant ignorance, and nobody needs to sink that low. For themselves, or others.

In conclusion, existential ideas and discussions are quite uncommon in this modern society.

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"Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question-- 'Is this all?"

-- Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique)

Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies."

--Rollo May, 1985, My Quest for Beauty, p. 172

"If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company"

--Jean-Paul Sartre

In the gleam of an eye you can see the misfortune, the pain, the agony, the joy, the triumph, the suffering, the prosperity. With the tap of a finger, feel the vibrations carry like wind through mountains, over plains, across rivers, into the sea. Have a sweet heart, and genuinely good intentions. Delve deep into the treasures stored that have been long forgotten, and leave a sugar trail behind you. Make love like love is, like love will always be; bona fide endearment. Falsehoods lead to defeat in the end and redemption falls short. Popularity is a contest in fictitious lives of empty tanning salons and catwalks caved in by time's wretched handle on the way bodies form, expand, deflate like birthday balloons after a month. Honest beauty. The game is simple and shallow. Shallow as the waters in the tub while scrubbing yourself clean of the sins bestowed by generations by generations by generations of living with distractions. The joke is on us, the world is on our shoulders because we, as a whole, put it there. We finance our own individuality, and pay taxes on our persona. Because if money makes a human, surely, a human must make money. The further we go into our ritualistic hunger and greed, the more we lose our innermost crucial dwelling space. We relapse like drug addicts without the dope, and recoil into the web of comfort. We put our physical ease before our physical needs, and we sink. We submerge ourselves in submarines of a predestined tragedy. We leap from person to person, flesh to flesh, trying to find the mirror image of ourselves that, doubtlessly, ceased to exist once we forgot the genesis of our being. Our tears have transformed from water to stone over centuries of two-faced heartache and golden ages of big bucks and fancy garments. Ruby encrusted whatchamacallits and diamond doodads. Pearls upon pearls wasting away, no longer a secret to the seemingly infinite sea. We kill and collect, take and forget. We thank those who thank us, and rapidly lose respect. Our mortality is glamorous. Being bashful is beautiful. Looking young is overrated, and wisdom is worthy, so think less about the wants the cravings, the yearnings. Think about the necessities, and the way you develop, learn, die and perish into the damp, cool earth. None of us win. None of us are a cut above anybody else. We live, we die. It's the in-between that we have to digest.