In Continuum.

Perhaps it was a courting ritual that was unique to them both, and maybe it was the shape of things to come. At any rate, they broke up soon afterwards, and the boys didn't exactly get to meet her very often after that. I remember one of my friends reporting her sighting at a local gas station, behind a counter and pressing buttons all day long. I've conversed with her a couple of times, and the impression I got from her a few years down the road was the same reason why my friend decided to break it off with her. She was a child, or seemed to be that way, someone who didn't have a lot of depth, and was there momentarily in his life to fill up a part of his life. Like a furniture you bought out of a whim, you know, it is that kind of purchase you end up being completely regretful of. I remember one of the nights out during my time in the army when I went out with some of my friends, and I bought a soccer jersey for no apparent reasons. I wore it once and tossed it aside, unsure of why I even bothered in the very first place. I mean, I am not even a fan of soccer to begin with, and it didn't even have the perfect size for me. But I bought it anyway, at two dollars shy of a fifty dollar note, I bought that sports jersey in which I wore for just once. It is one of those stupid decisions that you look back upon with the utmost confusion, and you start to wonder to yourself - what the hell was I thinking?

In the years to come, I would gradually learn about relationships, love, and the mechanisms involved in them. It is a giant machine made up of a thousand million bolts and gears, by an abstract God of some kind far, far away. It is difficult to comprehend the scale at which love is, or the complexities involved in working with such a machinery. If you operate it correctly, it makes you life easier, and it improves you as a person and makes you feel better about yourself. However, if you are not careful with it, you get a cut on your hand or, worse, you get your whole arm sliced off and crushed. But this machine does not seem to have a very big purpose at all, we don't really know what to do with it at the very beginning. There are buttons along the side and levers for you to pull, and there's always that occasional warning lights that you have to take note of. But at the end of the day, we do not know where the conveyor belt is taking us, or what comes out from the other end of this great beast of a machine. But we work at it anyway, and we slave for it for hours on end everyday. Because we love to love, and we love someone else. We love the feeling of being close to this idea, this ideal, this really comfortable feeling that wraps itself around you.

And so I did learn a great many things about this machine, and I had an inkling of an idea of where it was supposed to go. But it bites back at you doesn't it, it rips your heart out and turns it into a rock. It is some kind of transformer machine, I realized, that takes something that belongs to you and turn it into something else. There isn't a guarantee what comes out on the other end, but I knew in my first relationship that it wasn't something better than what I offered in the first place. I wanted my heart back, the one that I gave away in the first place, the one that wasn't the heart that I was holding in my cold hard hands. I wanted everything that I had before, all of those returned back to me. But it was a lesson that I had to learn, something that I had to go through to grow up - and I did grow up, even if it was just a little bit. I think the awesome thing about human beings is that we learn, on an individual level, we always learn. Some of us need just a small lesson, while some others need to go through a lot of suffering to learn. But I believe in that capacity to learn, and I went through enough on my part to know how a thing or two about love. Oh love, it is such a dangerous thing to handle with bare hands.

A friend of mine appeared in class today, looking like a zombie being awoken prematurely out of his slumber. She isn't usually like that, and she is always the kind of person you want to meet in the morning because, well, she won't make you lose track of how good things can turn out in a day. I think the people from my social group can all agree that she is the legs of this identity. When we seem to be stuck in a hole, she is the engine that pushes us forward somehow. She is the person that comes up to you in a rainstorm to push your broken down van forward, and she does everything with a smile on her face and an enthusiasm that you simply cannot ignore. We love her for who she is, even though she could seem to be a completely different person with the help of a certain energy drink, readily available in vending machines everywhere. She can be suddenly amplified by those, but she is ultimately still the same person that we've gotten to know, the same person that we've grown to love. She is, within our minds and hearts, the corner stone of many of our happy times in school, and I suppose it is only natural for us to want to be involved in the times when she needs us the most. Through the thick and the thin, that's what they always say right?

It is the saddest thing of all when we found out about the recent event that came to past in her life, a shocking and somewhat confusing turn of events that shall remain vague and ambiguous like this sentence. The incident is somehow related to the story I mentioned at the very beginning, the one with my friend and his girlfriend. Two words that were being thrown around recklessly broke the heart of this friend of mine, and it doesn't seem to be resolved anytime soon. I, as a friend, feels more puzzled than infuriated for the most part, simply because of the state in which we left them before the weekend began. Then something happened in the weekend which triggered this, the words being thrown and a heart being broken. A zombie was thus born, and a person we all got to know so well was swallowed into its filthy guts. She came to school with her insides dug out, left at home, or lost somewhere along the way. When asked about what happened, she whispered softly under her breath as if her life has gone out of her completely. It was not until the hard questions came did she admit to what happened, in which many of us reacted in the same state of puzzlement as I am right now.

In any kind of relationship, I feel, there are things that you shouldn't be saying so lightly. More than just the patronizing words of saying how your pregnant wife is just as beautiful as she was before she got pregnant, more than trying to turn every harsh and hurtful word into an euphemism, threatening to "break up", even as a joke, should never ever be tolerated in any relationship. There are some jokes that cannot be said, pranks that should never be pulled. Threatening to break up is not only stupid, but it is also a childish thing to do. It shows a lack of depth, the inability to comprehend the importance of what is at hand, or the sacred nature of it all. To randomly throw those words around on a whim is like a mad man on the run with a semi-automatic rifle, shooting at random people in a shopping mall. Somebody is going to get hurt someone, and it just goes to show that you cannot care less about everything else. It cheapens a relationships, it degrades it right down to the bones and then it shatters it with a sledgehammer. It is merciless, this sick and crude joke, and it is not funny at all. Even if it was not said with malicious intentions, the damage can still be done in the most painful ways.

I am by no means an expert in the topic of love, and I do not suppose anybody else is. All I have are my words, and what I have learned personally in my life. With my current relationship, I learned that love should be simple, though not necessarily shallow. It is like an iceberg that runs deep into the sea, and yet without the jagged edges to cut you when you fall. It doesn't have to run wide, but it certainly needs to run deep in any kind of ocean that you go to. You work hard at it, you devote your time to it, but it should never feel obligatory in any way. Love is like that, or rather love should be like that. It isn't a responsibility, it should be voluntary; it shouldn't be a chore, it should be a way to set you free. None of us start a relationship to see it end, at least not the kind that we once held dear. The word "love" should never be thrown around like bird food to a flock of pigeons, but something special to someone special. Like the words "break up", they should never surface in any relationship unless it is real, that it was meant to be said. Saying it freely cheapens and degrades all the "love", the word, that came in between the beginning and the end. It negates everything that came along in the first place, and it is cruel.

With my current girlfriend, I feel the need to want to work hard, and work harder. Though, feeling a need does not necessarily mean that I feel obliged, or that I signed some kind of contract to begin with. An urge, maybe, but not a necessity. I feel like I want to do something, to make it work out, and it is never going to go that way if you are always going to keep "breaking up" as an option, you know. If you always allow your relationship to make space for breaking up, then it is bound to go that way all the time. If you do not provide an option E for your multiple-choice questions, no one is going to pick that as an answer. We don't go into a relationship to believe that breaking up should be a viable option to a problem, and it should never be that way. I feel that love shouldn't be able making space for somebody else to come in, but it should be more about having that person fill up the space that you already have. It shouldn't be about throwing away your furniture to make way for the new, but more about what you can do with the space that has been given to you. Knowing that you have only that much space left, it is a thought that humbles you as a person. Knowing that you only have this little space to toy around with, makes you realize that how important it is to make it right. Love shouldn't turn you out into a hollowed-out version of you, but it should fill you up with all sorts of emotions and feelings, and that is something a beautiful girl of mine once told me.

Perhaps you made him out to be better than who he is in reality, maybe you wanted him to be the way that the previous lover of yours was not. Your romantic projection was so livid in a way, that it may have become an expectation too great to fulfill. Expectations entail disappointments, and that is the saddest part in this whole screwed up story, isn't it? It isn't so much about who he is and what he has done, but the idea that you jumped from one lousy relationship into another. It is the pitfall that you are experiencing now, the falling short of your expectations, and the disappointment afterwards. Having something not change for the better when, with all your heart, you've hoped for it to change can be the most painful thing in the world. It stabs you, and then it twists itself in like a blade. But then we all try our best to pick ourselves up, because that in itself is another lesson learned. I learned it the hard way as well, moving old furniture back into my house and never allowing anybody to take away what is rightfully mine. Neptina is someone I invited into my home, someone who completes the rest of this perfect house that is inside my head. She doesn't replace who I am, and she isn't a projection of who I want her to be, who she ought to be. Neptina is Neptina, just as how love should be love. Love isn't supposed to hurt, and you are not meant to be hurt too. You are you, and you are one of the greatest people that I know. So dust yourself off, point your chin up again, and I hope dearly that you will have the courage to believe in things, all over again.