This is Life

I am not well-known and do not expect at this point in my life that I will ever be remembered for anything monumental or worth putting in a book. Perhaps someone in the years to come will stumble upon something I have done or to which I have contributed, and perhaps they will for a moment daydream and wonder who I was, pondering my life much in the way that I ponder about the lives of the people who leave behind their anonymous footprints in the snow...

I have frequently battled with the collective mindset of history's greatest philosophers who boast ardently of love and life and purpose, waxing poetic about human nature. I have questioned the validity of their words for fear that my existence in this world in this time is an error, that an ingredient essential to human nature was missing at my conception...that I am doomed to a life forsaken of the ability to thoughtlessly embrace such vital elements as love, life, and purpose without condition. And yet, I have always dreamed of and striven toward the fabled sense of fulfillment and passion intrinsic to being unconditionally loved and in love with another.

Today's society is two-faced: We worship the ideal of true love and romance, yet we criticize those who abandon logic for love. True love is all that you need to survive, yet we never cease the selfish scramble to fill our lives with that which brings security. And yet, in the most average of people, there glow the faint embers of hope. A hope that, despite the cruel and insensitive expectations of this world for how we should live and die, such beautiful ideas as love and romance may magically exist for us or perhaps even someone close to us, and that this may restore our faith in humanity.

I am through questioning fruitlessly about the concept of being in love, because I have found someone who stands apart from this world of miserable cowards, of which I am a member, afraid to recklessly embrace passion between themselves and another lost soul. I have found someone so genuine in heart whose sense of love, life, and purpose are so romantically entwined and embraced that, in coming to know her, she has released me from my own and from society's shackles of uncertainty and self doubt regarding true love and life. My glowing embers are brought to life by her faith that romance is as powerful an element in our lives as we desperately hope it can be. I am alive.