Somehow, as you wander through this life, you find yourself drawn time and time again to a thing so perfect that you can not avoid the need to find yourself in that space and time over and over, no matter how hard you try to avoid it. Then, on the other side of the bright shiny coin of life, are the places...the things, so disfunctionally ugly, that you go back over, and over because you can't believe you have seen what you have seen. Kind of like a car wreck. You can't believe it has happened...the pain...the mortality...so you have to get a glimpse. Even though you know it has nothing to do with your place in the world. No matter how gruesome the scene, you will look every time.

This is the way I view friendships, and relationships, in general. Was it a beautiful thing, that you can't help but revisit??? OR, was it the carnage, the sheer raw bleeding emotion...knowing that by entertaining this thought you have thrown your heart on the cheese grater of life, that has drawn you back one more time.

I have opened myself up to the cheese grater yet again. That one person that, no matter how you are unattracted to them, have forgotten their BS, FINALLY wrote them off...you can't not take the call. Something about the sound of their voice slices deep into the tin of the Can of Emotions where you have place them in Life's Pantry, and you open...smell the fetid smell... yet still can not deny them. It is impossible. It is not love. It is not care. It is pure need. The person you honestly wish you had never met...because it confused you THAT much.

At first, you were afraid to lose the feeling. The person. Yet, at some point you have the conversation. The conversation that destroys you, and breaks you, and shreads you, and leaves you alone, and oozing with regret for "what should have been". Eventually, predictably, the conversation becomes rote memory. "Look, I love you, I miss you, and I can't let you come into my life, make me some emotional band-aid until you feel better, and then mold me into your personal shrink. Yes. I will miss you. Yes. I care about you. Yes. I will always, no matter what, be there when you fall...but, I really need for you to try not to fall this time. Yes. You are my best friend, and no, I don't want to talk to you any more."....

Time goes by. Life goes one. You miss the person less, and less. You realize they do not define you...as a matter of fact they may be the antithesis of you. You love life. You smile...and then...one day...that voice is on the machine, and it's calling, and you cry, and you pray for strength,...but you call. You always, call.

That...that gaping, oozing, crying, weeping, fetid sore...that is unconditional love. That is the definition, and it breaks you every time.