mush and sentimental gibberings.

Ah, love.

We sing about it, write about it, cry and laugh and wonder about it. In times of old, we had great and silly and often pointless battles about it. Great works of art have been created because of it.

Such a simple thing, and yet so difficult to describe accurately. It can be a verb, a noun, and even a pronoun if one gives it the name of Kama or Cupid. It's been said to make the world move and stop simultaneously. "Love is a many-splendoured thing."

I'm no philosopher. I'm just a young woman, sitting on the floor in my hot apartment, listening to pretty songs sung by people with pretty voices. I'm only in my first year of university- in no way do I pretend to be somewhat of an expert of love. But I do love to read works by such people as Sheakespeare, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Hardy. Oh, poor Tess, and poor Juliet, and poor Ophelia. They had their fierce passions. But don't we all? Aren't we all capable of allowing ourselves to feel the kind of passion that could be our downfall? In loving, don't we all give the person of our desires the power to not only love us in return, but also to destroy us?

In all the reading I do, in all the songs I listen to, I often come across sayings that leap out at me in certain ways. I remember these sayings, I write them down in my slanting cursive on pieces of paper, and I post them on the walls of my room with blue-tac. I have a piece from Hamlet, quotes from movies, from books, etc.

"Doubt that the stars are fire; doubt that the sun doth move; doubt the truth for a liar; but never doubt I love." Easily one of my favorite quotes. Doubt anything you like, but never the simple and yet astoundingly complex act of loving and being in love. That one thing cannot be doubted, be you a person of no social standing whatsoever or a king.

"At the touch of love, everybody becomes a poet." True, no? And not only a poet, but a shameless and silly fool into the bargain, driven away from logic and reason by devotion and passion. Oh, I've been the fool my share of times. Complete with the cap and bells and the full kit of the court jester- the whole works. I've felt it enough that I ought to shy away when I begin to feel it again, but I find myself recklessly moving onward. I move onward- and yet, some part of me knows that I will eventually fall again, and be right back where I started.

Doesn't it seem as though the love that is the most passionate, the most painful, and yet also the most memorable to you is the one which you cannot easily have? The one you must really fight for; the one where you are sure your actions will never be returned or even acknowledged, and yet you still don't care? I'm not talking about such petty things as celebrity crushes. Elizabeth Barrett Browning hit the nail on the head when she talked about loves that were at once earthly, common, and divine/heavenly/godlike. As did Tom Robbins when he said that love is the ultimate outlaw, because it just won't adhere to any rules, and the most anybody can to is to sign on as its accomplice.

"My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free."

I could go on forever with this post of mine. I must have a million questions.

Can a person love somebody and yet be in love with somebody else?

How do you make love stay? (Kevin Bacon says it's by keeping the fights clean and the sex dirty. Interesting.)

Why does love make us act so stupid?

Why is it so painful, so terrible, and at the same time, so wonderful?

I feel true sympathy for Ophelia. I literally almost cried in the middle of Literature 12 when reading her mad scene in Hamlet. Poor, poor Ophelia.

All you wanted was love.