Inspired by this link if it's still working

I would rather lose a limb than admit love. And I don't mean a sissy limb, like a pinky or a nipple or an earlobe. I would rather lose a leg--the whole leg--or the head, brain case and all, or the genitals. I would rather lose my forearms or an eye--nothing a prosthesis couldn't fix, a glass eye. The surgeon, like God, can do anything; he cuts with mathematics, with precision. I might say that I would rather death completely, but admitting love is close enough to death. When the heart wilts, the whole body follows, until you are a thing of decay, of decrepitude. To hobble about on a pegleg seems less humiliating, less pathetic, less unmendable.

To admit love is to accept your demise. Rarely do I tell a friend, "Oh, I like that one;" even more rarely do I tell that one. Even when in elementary school, it would take a game of Truth or Dare and six shots of chocolate milk for me to spill. We would sit in a circle and demand, demand, demand: "Who do you have a crush on? I bet it's Melissa Johnson!" And the poor, helpless victim would cower behind their hands and beet-red cheeks, and cry, "Never! I don't have a crush on anyone!" Eventually, we would force it from their mouths, and exclaim, "Melissa Johnson! We knew it! We knew it!" and do our dance of triumph. And then we would taunt and torture them until they cried.

Look, even, at the terms. "Crush" implies the destruction, the weight, the smithereens. And now, when we really love someone, we say, "I like them." Absurd! You don't "like" people; you like snow days, pies, stamp collections. If you love someone the way you like a stamp collection, it's safe to say it wasn't meant to be. We call it "like," because love is unbearable, embarrassing, horrific; "like" is comfy, neutral, platonic. Love is cruel and ugly, love is shameful; "like," however, is nice, and retractable. And so we call it by a lesser name, to make it seem unimportant, because love makes us feel unimportant. Love is frightening. But before we can discuss Love's sadistic cycle, or the inferiority felt in Love, we must first trace the threads to their start.

When you have a certain affection for a person, they become larger than life. They become these fantastical beings, things we dreamed up as kids. We indulge ourselves in these fantasies, these dreamscapes, and we imagine what it would be like to hold them, to kiss them, to know the placement of every pore, the seconds between heartbeats. They become, then, this thing in our minds, transcended somehow from their true form. We finish all their sentences. We dictate their actions and thoughts. We say, "She loves me. She wouldn't have said this if she didn't." But do we do our homework? Our little background checks? Do we interrogate the witness and demand to know the source of "I'll miss you when you go" or "hope to see you"? Of course not. What does the truth matter? Who needs the truth when we can slip simply into delusion, like a glove?

And that is where the horror begins.

Admitting love is horror. The heart is the true vital organ, and without it, the rest goes to pieces. And so it must be guarded like a president. But like the President, the heart is idiotic. Essential, but idiotic. We would make terrible surgeons; when in love, our brains, our logic, starts to wander, and the heart takes control. Objectivity--mathetmatics--is out the door, and the bright, stupid world of wishful thinking opens up.

This person--we have made them up inside our hearts. We've envisioned them kissing us, embracing us, making love to us, whispering sweet nothings in our ears, none of which they've actually done. And at a certain point, we realize this. We realize we are love junkies, shooting another hallucination into our veins, about the day we will marry them and the house we'll live in and the children playing in the yard, frenzied as jumping beans. We realize those years of commitment haven't happened. It was all a fantasy, our imagination tugging at our logic by its leash.

So we think to ourselves, "Well--how might I own their heart? How might I get that wedding and that house and those beautiful, little babies?" And the only way, it seems, is to tell them everything. We must put on our big leather boots, march right up to them and shout, "Hey you! I think I love you!" And they'll whirl around, moon-mouthed, and scoop you in their arms, and plant a million and one kisses on your brow, your lips, your cheek, your nose--all over--and you'll ride into the sunset, like they always do in paperbacks.

Right?

Well, not exactly. Mull over the evidence. The love letters, you find, are just letters. "See you soon" means just that. "I'll miss you"? Well, so does your grandmother. That pat on the ass? She gave one to him, and him, and him, too. That top-secret confession he made to you? Well, she knows, and she knows, and she knows. And, besides, he hasn't called or seen you in days--he's out with so-and-so more often than he is with you.

This is, in part, where love makes us feel inadequate, unimportant. We begin to realize that the object of our affection is not nearly as attentive or devoted or exclusive as we envisioned them to be--as we constructed them to be. This fosters feelings of inadequacy, and we wonder just what we're doing wrong, that this person hasn't swept us off our feet yet. We lie awake at night, mapping out our ploys to gain focus and reverence from the person we so desire, and lie awake still when they fail. It is in these frustrating, wide-eyed nights that we are sobered. The castle walls crumble; the prince becomes a pauper.

In accepting the true reality of our love, and our position in relation to that love, it nearly dismantles the fantasy, which we previously had identified as "reality." The dreams of backyard family barbecues and baby showers are all but extinguished. We are doomed, in this moment. Doomed. We realize that the person may think us no more special than canned tuna or a supermarket fern. Perhaps we do not even enter their minds, let alone their hearts. On the other hand, they've become our hearts, our minds. In a sense, we have opened ourselves to invasion, and our hearts screech and wail, like air raid sirens. To tell them how we feel, as embarrassing or torturous as it seemed before, is now an impossibility, for now we run the risk of rejection and exposure, and the horrors of unrequited love.

If our dearly beloved rejects us, we lose everything. Kiss the heart goodbye, and with it the lungs, the brain, the kidneys, the tongue, the bladder certainly. Kiss goodbye the house, the car, the kids, the wedding bands, the golden anniversary you worked so hard to make it to. Kiss the kiss goodbye, the touch, the sex, the hand-holding, the mornings you awaken in each other's arms. "No" will take it all away. "I don't love you back" will freeze our assets, will seize our lovely little dreams from their cradles. It makes the crush crush. The fantasy is what warms us; it's what keeps our engines chuffing. To take that away would be like death, that cold and final descent into lifelessness, and lovelessness. It would be a hollowing, arm parts and leg parts and organs, like candy from a human pi�ata. The fantasy is all that brings us close to that person, and to lose that fantasy is to lose that person, and to lose that person is to lose our hearts, our happiness, our love. And so we hold dearly to this make-believe, because it keeps us from fully feeling grief.

But, once realized, we are haunted by the pangs of reality. We glow in our faux lover's presence, and when they're gone, we dim, and die a little, spiraling down and down. And this makes love cruel. To taste bliss, sweet and boundless, but fantastical, all the while sinking into quicksand. Reality, from which we never can escape.

We want, we crave so feverishly that which we cannot have. That's my kind of love: the most frustrating, the masochistic. I've loved girls with The Serious Boyfriend. I've loved carbon copies of my ex, man-eaters who would kill instead of kiss. I've loved girls who were moving to Florida, Virginia, Montana. And with each one came shame, and devastation.

But each time, like a child to its mother, I clung to that fantasy. I held to that wish, and wrote poems, played songs, tried to woo them with my conjurer's tongue. And the heart, each night, would shut upon itself, swallowed by a darkness, a hollowness. To see (it seems) the whole world in love, I feel cheated and wronged. I fear that, should I toss away this fantasy, I'll have nothing, be nothing, a shell of something vaguely human. And with each passing day, without progress, I am right. I am validated. Better, I say, to lose an arm, to lose an eye, and have it over with. The stitches will come out in two weeks' time. The heart, once it drops, is irretrievable.

"I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me."