There’s a love coming to us all.

I’m sitting in Theories of Personality and, in my attempts to stay awake, I have two fingers propping my ever drooping head up. In recognition of the fact that this class could be used in Guantanamo Bay to aid in prisoner torture, my fingers formed a smooth flesh colored gun aimed directly at my left temple. As my pointer finger fiddles lightly with the imaginary trigger, by body screams “pull!” Pull the cognitively constructed trigger and splatter my hypothetical brains all over the girl sitting next to me. I tilt my head and look at her from the corner of my eye. She’d cry. I convince myself, that on the off chance she was sprayed with my emotional brain juice, she’d bawl her eyes out. Nonetheless, it’d certainly send a clear and concise message to the professor. Analyze this professor, I’d say my personality screams boredom induced proclivities towards suicide. Alas, I digress. In my playful manner of bringing a gun to my head, I begin to wonder about the sheer profoundness of blowing your brains out, in the literal sense. I’ve never been one to toy with suicidal tendencies, but I question if that would be the way I’d want to go. Number one, you run the risk of just fucking yourself up enough to put you in a lovely, almost functional vegetable state. Flash to guardians fighting about pulling the plug, press coverage, and well…tubes. Then, I begin wondering where your best off putting the gun. You can’t easily put it the back of your head, and there’s always your temple, where my imaginary gun currently lay, or the more menacing of the options is to go barrel to mouth. So there it is, you put the gun half way down your throat, tongue the cold steel and try not to choke, all the while hopping that your aimed at the back of your brain so that you die instantly. To bring you back, I’m sitting in a classroom filled with students much like myself, me a potentially healthy and non-suicidal human being, drawing up the best ways in which to put a bullet through the back of my head whilst the teacher explains arbitrary and potentially useless ways to test monkeys. Nonetheless, all I can sit and wonder is, if in my final moments, I would want to taste a cool blend of steel and gun powder mixed with an intense fear of messing up and ending up as your favorite Lifetime special. In that moment, I envied suicide victims, at least they could accomplish something.

Murder, love, heartbreak, war…they all coincide at some point. We hit this metaphorical wall where our entire lives are wrapped up in other people. Love and destruction drive us, and we fall for our enemies in a constant battle with our own hearts. In the end, it’s all murder. Love, heartbreak, war…everything is just murder. We all die a little faster, and give up a little sooner every time we experience these things. I’m convinced that emotionally, love and heartbreak are on the same wavelengths. Just as much as your whole body feels love, in the same capacity it feels heartbreak. Frankly, they feel the same. It’s a hard, dark moment that takes over everything you are, regardless of whether or not it’s the promise of love or the bitter spoils of broken hearts. These emotions, whether your value them in the highest, or place them as the least of your concerns, are both diseases people spend their entire lives running from. There is no cure, there is no anecdote, there’s just the searing pain that comes with loving someone with everything you have in you, and the same searing pain we battle the minute our heart understands the capacity it has to break. You know those moments when you can feel your heart right inside your chest? Like its right there, an organ you can manipulate and change. As if you have some sort of control over your heart. Not so much the steady beats that pump life into the rest of your extremities, but more or less the heartache or joy that everyone feels. Much like your legs are not simply modes of transportation, but feet and knees that bruise and scar, you could really feel this too. There it was, pumping absentmindedly inside your chest, and you could really feel the hurt that was left there from all the times you got it wrong. Almost as though you could rip open your ribcage and pull out a vessel built purely on emotion, biological function aside. Attempts at self preservation through personal consolation was never a healing remedy, instead its a round-about way of affirming the fact something really is wrong. Thinking of someone else’s heart worsens the thumping hurt, its just a reminder that they feel nothing. So there you are, battling this pumping organ spreading life past your once numb soul and working as a catalyst for this new hurt. A hurt that you try so hard to mask in the triumph of a new hope. Nonetheless, this new hope, albeit a warming placebo, may be the next hit that spirals into further lifetimes of addiction. This addiction is our love and heartbreak, this pain is our lives…this empty room, a kamikaze solider prepared for battle, is our heart.