Love isn't Real
Ben Bublick

When I sat in my car and landed my head on the steering wheel feeling the Armor-all conquer my scalp, I knew that love wasn’t real. I continued to sit, now with my hands through my shaved head and the left side of my forehead threatening to break the glass of my car window, I knew that love hadn’t been what my image of love produced; love isn’t real, it makes me sad. As a matter of fact, I’d never met sadness before I met love. Turning the ignition with purposeless, un-assignable tears in my eyes, I reversed with some mix of frustration, I think it was. And for the fifteen minutes it took me to get home, I felt like I belonged nowhere, that I had no memories and that no one knew me, but that I was going to be passed down for posterity. I don’t think I was aware of it, but I really hadn’t felt better in the past almost-a-year. In the garage, strangely, I once again crumbled in the driver’s seat and became catatonic, but astutely reflexive, in case anyone were to glimpse me teary eyed. And the thing is, I don’t even know why I cried. Love made me like that and I put all the blame on it. Its so ephemeral and the times during the change that are remarkable are always overweighed and blacked out by this pulling jumble of emotions that are too tawdry to handle all the time. Love isn’t real, love is just turning out to be an arranged commitment with its benefits. Now that I think of it, love is like a golf or a piano lesson. Once you sign up, you have to pay for a couple lessons and there is always something pressuring you to stick with it. Love is so intangible, in a greedy way, that a lover’s touch is a concession or an advantage. Stumbling up my stairs, I thought that love was just a belief and not a truth and I still agreed with myself in my crystal-lighted, scintillating bathtub with all the fixings for a sexy augmentation of what I thought. Love could be real; when it is real, I’ll know that I wont’ be writing these testimonials.