By Ola Roks

Unrequited love has to be the hardest pain to endure. You can’t really be mad at the other person for not reciprocating, but the agony of still having those feelings – that’s a doozy.

Boozing it might help.  You might run into someone new at the bar or the club and they may make for a good distraction, but for a while that one person will always sit in the back of your mind. It is haunting. The worst is being absolutely convinced that the person is “the one” and that you just need to do some convincing to get them to agree with you.

You can’t make someone love you back. It’s tragic, right?

I’ve got tragic penned to the tee. Try being in love and you know it’s not one-sided but neither of you has the balls to come forward and do anything about it. Try it out not for a few weeks, but for months. Turn that tension into full-on bickering. Let them take you for a ride, push you off the edge of a cliff and grab you by the sweater to keep you from falling, over and over.

Get so caught up in a human being that it eats away at your workday, your daydreams, your dreamscapes. Lose yourself in such deep thought over it that you lose the advanced green arrow turning left at an intersection and nearly t-bone a cop in an SUV. Then laugh out loud at your own silly weakness when he pulls you over because it just about cost you two demerit points, a $110 ticket and skyrocketing insurance rates. (It’s cool though, maintain your dopey grin, tell the cop honestly but frankly “I had a brainfart” and he will let you off with a warning not to do it again, if you’re lucky).

Right on, now suddenly I’ve got feelings. I never had them before. Quit smoking, get on the health kick, maybe revise the way you interpret life, because you see something in them that you can sympathize with, maybe they’ve given you a reason to be a better person. Like yo, I could totally water your plants and clean your apartment out of love if you’d just give me the time of day. Then the saddest moment will come when you arrive at the realization that progress in this enigmatic circumstance is one step forward two steps back, and everything that happens is beyond your control.

I am a control freak. Everything about love scares the shit out of me because it is out of my control. I don’t like being a control freak. It would be nice to just let loose and fart without consideration, so-to-speak. But I am doomed to calculated and meticulous analysis of everything from my shoelaces to the apostrophes in my sentences, and throw in another human being and it puts me in a tailspin. Good Lord, what have I gotten myself into? But no, now don’t be hasty, love is not supposed to be easy, you’ve got to work on it and make it work, and all of that Dr. Phil stuff they say on the television you watch.

It takes you a long time to determine there is some mutual interest happening. Eventually you put two and two together and grow some semblance of balls. You put some effort into making a move, maybe open your mouth for once, and get the door slammed in your face. You try again and the door slams in your face again. You think “Jeez, what did I ever do to have this coming?” but figure it must be karma from all of the years of torture you’ve put past lovers through. Add insult to injury when you see that they will speak to anyone but you about you, and when you do run into them, they bail like the women and children of the Titanic.

You begin to question yourself: Have I lost it? Am I wrong? But then you review the signals you have gotten, the signs they’ve sent and decide that there is no way you can be wrong. What is the problem here? Why is this so difficult? What happened to the dignity of simple courtship in this age of electronics and emails? Why can’t I just open my mouth and say what I feel? Why does my heart climb up to my throat when I see them? Oh gosh. This must be that thing they talk about in good books and movies. This is what my mother warned me about when she said “one day, you will fall for someone and you will lose your ability to think and act rationally - You will do anything for them, you’ll see.” I laughed it off right, I assured her I have a brain of my own and there is no one out there that will bend me to their will.

I was wrong. I guess I am human. By now I am some hybrid of human and grape; the amount of wine in this bloodstream far outweighs the benefits of this not-so-recent healthy lifestyle acquisition. I laugh and I cry just moments apart. Emotions swing from splendid to treacherous at the drop of a dime. The heart beats inside the ribcage like the motor on a beaten up lawnmower, faster and louder than anything in the room.

I reek, I absolutely reek of desperation, and I have stopped caring. I embrace this weakness because as much as this hurts me down to the core and eats away at me, this has made me aware of something I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise: there is such thing as love, and there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop it.