Why Do We Love The People We Can’t Have?

Sometimes I find myself with this deep urge to run to you and tell you everything. For my words to bloom with your presence. To not mask a single feeling or hint of emotion from you, to emit my entire life story one night in the rain. As cheesy as it sounds, I want to cry while I press my ear to your chest. I find myself feeling most alive when hearing the sound of your life beating behind your ribcage.

I’ll wrap you tightly in my arms and cry onto your sweater proclaiming my loneliness and my longing for your company. I’ll tell you how I think I’m addicted to heartbreak. I’ll tell you that you’re the one I was thinking of as I plucked the petals off the daisy and concluded, “He loves me not.”

In my mind I romanticize your problems; I can’t help but find them beautiful. You told me that you shouldn’t be with me until you sort your demons out. Is it strange that I want your demons to become our demons? Your past doesn’t hinder me, I only care about your future — a future that hopefully holds me next to you.

I could probably spend five straight days in bed with you, side by side, doing nothing but listening to your breath and letting our fingertips dance on each other’s skin. I could listen to your stories of your travels, of your past, taking notes in my head as your words flow freely from your mouth.

Instead, you spend hours upon hours listing the reasons why I’m too good for you. I don’t want to hear it, I’d prefer to hear how I belong with you. Just because I haven’t revealed my own demons yet doesn’t mean they’re nonexistent.

People say that you’ll get what you want if you want it badly enough, but I want you so bad that it hurts. What they say has yet to be proven true, when does it become enough? It feels like it’s been forever since we’ve met, but you still have yet to realize we are worthy of each other’s love.

We crave what we can’t have, what we are unable to obtain — but why? Why do we always want what other people tell us we can’t have? Why does it feel like a neverending cycle where you belittle the ones who do like you and are belittled by the ones you pursue? When is there a break in this cycle?

Perhaps we continue along this cycle for the art that we can create from it. From misery comes inspiration, right? I can write word after word and create substance out of my feelings. Yet sometimes I fee like I’m only capable of loving someone who doesn’t love me back. In the times I have thought I had found love, it was never there. When I have been loved, I haven’t felt the same. Do we even know what love really is if I have never experienced a love that is reciprocated? Is it that we feel we’re not worthy of love, so we chase it where it will never exist?

Maybe so, but maybe that’s what love is. Love is putting your heart into something that you are uncertain about. Someone that you find rare, maybe someone you wish you were more like. You love someone you are fascinated by, not someone who is going through the same day-to-day routine as you. Maybe what you love what you find interesting, not familiar or ordinary. Unfortunately, that’s why it doesn’t always work out — because of those differences. But who am I to define what love is, when I’m not sure if I’ve even truly felt what love is capable of?

I want to tell you I think I have finally found love with you. I almost expect you to save me, which I know I shouldn’t do. You can be the one to break me free from the cycle. I continue to linger at the thought that you are something, but inherently I know it will end in heartbreak once more. It’ll end with me chain-smoking cigarettes just to recall the taste of when you last kissed me.