I was putting away books tonight and one dropped on the floor and when I picked it back up it was as if this one page, in particular, wanted to be "seen." And I ended up checking it out and taking it home from work with me and now I almost wish I had not. It is both compelling and unsettling and also (it seems) caught up in Gone Girl fever. I told myself I was going to read it because it might work as a possible book club selection for work, but really all it is doing is making me uncomfortable :(

I really think that all you can do when you have unreturned feelings for someone is accept that they are not going to ever be a part of your life, to take peace and happiness from knowing they make your world brighter and to just silently pray that they are okay.

Sometimes, I write quotes down from books that really really affect me and this is something I read that was powerful enough to help me on a very bad day:

“Don't be ashamed. Yes, this is not easy for you. Yes, it is unexpected. But I don't think any one of us should be ashamed of who we love…but even then, peel back the layers, disregard the circumstances, and love is love. Some of us just have the good fortune of finding it under less taxing circumstances.”

--The Look of Love, Sarah Jio

Also helping me (greatly) with this is the support I get from 
a very dear friend I can confide
in, even as I also worry that I am growing to care too much about her and how all confusing and weird and unnatural it seems to actually worry because you care about someone. In both my situations I have to wonder: what is so wrong, anyway, with deeply caring about someone? And which is it that hurts more: the thought of losing them or the thought of them finding out?

I wish I could be like Spock, but C.S. Lewis is right...

If only you could turn your feelings off like a water faucet...if only you turn love off like a water faucet. I have never known that to happen, though, no matter how much I have wanted it to be so.

one of the biggest (but well-meaning, I am sure) lies ever perpetuated in tv shows and movies...

Not being able to sleep plus loneliness plus watching something unbelievably heartfelt and genuine yet still hard to swallow equals pure misery...and may lead to a cynically-infused post like this one.

Up very late and catching an episode of "How I Met Your Mother" that I never have seen before I can not help but painfully remember why I stopped watching the show. Its main character's unbelievably steadfast and goofy and adorable belief in "the one" was just too much for me sometimes.

I do not think I ever stopped watching a show before because I liked it TOO much, but that is why I stopped watching HIMYM. And the goodness and the happiness and its unshakable conviction that true love does exist just eventually became too much for me and much too painful to believe in.

Maybe it is easy to still hold to such beautiful sentiment as this in your 20s and 30s but by 45...not so much. By 45 if you are single (no matter whether you are gay or straight) and still holding on to thoughts like these, you either waited for something that never happened or your "one" was not the one who felt the same.

Lovely and magical and sincere, yet somehow still more a fairy tale than not, these words strike me as actually almost harmful to one's sanity to believe...because if you go through your whole life thinking this is an absolute then you may be in for some really, really heartbreaking and devastating disappointment when it does not happen or the one you feel this way about is not the "one" for you...

Klaus:Victoria is wunderbar, but she is not my "Lebenslanger Schicksalsschatz." She’s my "Beinahe-Leidenschaftsgegenstand"… It means the thing that is almost the thing that you want, but it’s not quite. That is Victoria to me.
	Ted:	How do you know she’s not "Lebenslanger Schicksalsschatz?" Maybe as the years go by she’ll get "Lebenslanger Schicksalsschatz…ier?"
Klaus:	"Lebenslanger Schicksalsschatz" is not something that develops over time. It is something that happens instantaneously. It courses through you like the water of a   river after a storm, filling you and emptying you all at once. You feel it throughout your body, in your hands, in your heart, in your stomach, in your skin… Have you ever felt this way about someone?
Ted:	…I think so.
	Klaus:	If you have to think about it, you have not felt it.
Ted:	And you’re absolutely sure you’ll find that someday?
	Klaus:	Of course. Everyone does eventually… You just never know when or where it will happen.

unrequited feels like unrelenting...

...or her

I was reading on my iPhone last night and saw this and though it is directed to straight women, this advice (good advice, I think), of course, can apply to anyone who has one-way feelings for someone. I am really, really thinking about seeking therapy because how I feel has gone on far too long and having to be around someone you like so much on such a regular basis can be extremely difficult and painful sometimes...