Crazy Rich Jell-O

I thought I loved love.

I liked how crazy it makes you.

It’s thrilling and exhilarating,

It’s frustrating and infuriating.

You forget how important everything else is.

It’s like a drug,

Like how I imagine Coca-Cola tasted in the 1800s.

When it hits you so good,

You don’t want anything else anymore.

I’ve never felt the real love,

That was about more than just the feeling,

That was actually about the person.

No one I’ve met wants me to love them the way I want to give myself away.

Don’t they know, no one loves harder

Than someone who spent their life being suicidal?

That girl has nothing to lose,

So she has everything to give.

Too much, actually,

And not enough is leftover

To be happy with what there actually is.

My imagination creates something that doesn’t actually exist on this plane…

Am I remembering something from a world that disappeared?

A life I once lived that faded away like dust on top of specks of sand,

Where all that’s left is the smooth surface that was worn down with invisible hands?

Why do we remember things that never happened?

Why do our brains betray our minds?

I’m happy for the times

I got to play pretend

As I held my breath

Knowing it would end.

Sometimes it was only for a night

Or a couple weeks or nine months or three years too long.

A suspension in imagination

Is possible because reality is subjective.

Even though I can’t love anyone as much as I want to

Would I combust if I gave that love, instead, to myself?

This feeling is like a song I once heard

And I never knew the name.

It escapes me

And evades my memory

Even though I know it was once there.

I want to fall instead

For the love that’s real,

That’s friends’ laughter and hugs and badly sung karaoke with too much alcoholic Jell-O that makes you feel tingly and heavy

All at once.

The love we think we want

Isn’t as good as the love that’s real

That’s a good mother’s tears

That’s a baby clinging to your finger

It’s better to know love that doesn’t ask anything of you

That just asks you to be the best version of yourself.