I've spent half my life trying to fall behind.

I don't think I've ever been in love. I'm not even sure what love is supposed to be. Maybe I have been, and I didn't even know it. Maybe my idea of what love is is so fabricated that it doesn't really exist? I'm not cynical, just something I've been contemplating for a long time. I probably started considering what I thought was love since i was twelve years old or so. They say that love is compromise? I understand and believe that to a certain extent, but when do you draw the line? On compromising who you are, what you believe in, the way you act where is compromise actually just reforming yourself to keep someone else happy and not worrying about your own well being, and who am I to ask someone to give up these things to make ME happy? It's just very confusing. Maybe there comes a time when you meet someone that you (love?) so much that you stop caring about yourself and your needs because you need them more than you need yourself? I'm not that dependant.

I agree also that compromise shouldn't feel like a burden, but even in the best relationships I've seen it always seems like one person has to give up more than the other. How can love be permanent? Or perhaps it isn't and never was intended to be? Even if compromise works in the beginning, people are dynamic and constantly changing, are we supposed to one day just become static and cling to our ways? I could not and would never want to do that. Again, I'm not cynical or bitter toward the idea of love, I simply don't understand how it is supposed to work.

It just seems like everything else in our media filled world, from the outside it appears as a portion of something bigger, but when you step away from it, its like a puzzle where the pieces don't actually fit together. The more you step away, the more you realize that its not a picture but a refracted, broken mirror, like city lights, reflected from water. I could totally see myself alone and happy for the rest of my life. But am I supposed to think this way? Aren't we as humans supposed to desire human companionship? Maybe life isn't the broken mirror, maybe I am. It's a lot to think about.

When I'm outside, I feel relaxed and calm, the million thoughts an hour seem to leave my mind and I can just relax. But the moment I go back inside, go to work, go to the store It all comes flooding back, as if the walls and ceilings serve as a pressure system to force it all back into my head, It seems a bit overbearing sometimes, like I just want to tell my brain to shut up and let me be alone.

I just want to be outside. I want to be away from the ghosts of past lovers, past friends, the past me. Away from responsibility of my own actions, and the consequences of others around me.