Under My Skin Chapter One

            Love can be a dangerous thing for it unravels the dainty stitches that hold your heart together and neutralizes your senses without warning. It is a trespasser that digs a hole underneath the palisades that fortify the epicenter of your fragility. All those years of painstaking caution and/or offensive strategy (do unto others before they do unto you) becomes a thing of the past once you’ve met your match. There is no time to brace for the dawn offensive. The assault is swift: pain shocks you from nowhere and you realize a poisoned arrow had just zinged its way into your ribcage. Behold the bloodshed. Try to stop the bleeding, but you’re helpless for the first time. Suddenly, you identify with the carnage of hearts around the world. Suddenly, you’re on the other side, standing side by side with your lovesick comrades, immobile in front the firing squad of old flames. You’re not so smug anymore.

        Left and right you, one by one, they fall down, clambering for mercy, and many simply admit defeat in mute resignation. The question now, will you surrender? For a moment, your very tormenter is witness to your wretchedness. There is nothing more humiliating than loving a person who returns your devotion with indifference, cold stares, silence, and pity disguised in his white lies and alibis. There is nothing more humiliating than crying in front of that person. Come to think of it, we despise the ones who fall in love with us despite ourselves while we chase those who run away from the love we insist upon them, in despise. Why do we run away? Deep inside, we, too, despise ourselves knowing full well that we can never return the endearing affection they offer. Everyone wants to be loved back by the one he loves, simply human nature.

        When they persevere, the fools that they are, we are annoyed in love to them (but love different in their order slip). 

       She has experienced love at its highest, its turmoil, its delights, its enormity, even its wretchedness and shameless exploits. And in this case, her shameless exploits, all in the name of love. 

      She is but a nobody, or so she continually tells herself, but by happenstance, she feels love has put her on a pedestal. "Did I expect and desire this? I don't know. I don't know." She would ask herself often. These days, her answer is mostly I don't know, for a known know-it-all.