Love.

What is it? Can you touch it, taste it, hear it? Everyone will tell you that it's something you feel in your heart, but what does that even mean? Is it something that you can physically give to someone else, or do you realize it's there when it's too late?

If I could ever change one moment of my life, it would be when I lost my innocence to what love was. For fifteen years, I believed it to be magical. It was the power that saved my childhood Disney Princesses from death. Surely, it could do the same for me if I ever found my Prince Charming.

Oh, what dangerous thinking. It was thoughts like those that pulled me into the darkness, twisted my mind to think that my constant tears were ones of love, and placed me in situations where I was left helpless. The blinding power of those thoughts left me in a heap on the floor on my best friend's floor when I got the news.

The news that my Prince Charming had tried to kill himself.

It wasn't the first time. No, no. It was the third. The third time I had ripped myself apart from the inside out. The third time I had cried myself to sleep thinking that he had finally succeeded.

What do you say to the young innocent girl, crying in her bed in the middle of the night after just hearing her boyfriend had tried to commit suicide for the third time?

Oh, don't worry, he didn't die. It just gives him another chance to try again.

He'll come out of it. It just might take a couple more attempts.

Maybe if you love him more, he'll stay longer.

All of those answers had been ones I didn't want to hear. They were ones that haunted me in my dreams, were a key factor in my dropping grades, and brought the counselors to my classroom door.

And the constant phone calls didn't help. At times when I was left with no energy or without the will to go on any longer, my phone would ring. His broken voice, full of sobs and unseen tears, forced a smile on my face.

I would end up so physically drained, I would be left as an empty shell - my conscious mind having drifted out of my body. I was a lump of flesh.

Though it's hard to imagine, but fifteen-year-old me thought that those feelings and consequences was love at work. The restless nights, the doctor visits, and the dropping grades were obviously just love working its way into my life.

If I could ever go back and change a single moment in my relatively short existence, I would have never allowed myself to believe that love was magical.

Because love isn't something you can touch, taste, sense, or feel.

It's something you decide. 

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