Doubt Not

"Doubt thou the stars are fire/ Doubt that the sun doth move/ Doubt truth to be a liar/ But never doubt I love." The first time I read that, while studying Hamlet during my junior year in high school, I thought, "How come the most romantic line from Shakespeare is in a play about a guy who has to decide the morality of murder?" This illustrates nicely something I've come to realize more and more - love happens in the strangest of places. You can't choose when or where or with who you fall in love. It hits you like lightning or a bullet, and it's just as lethal. It's pathetic, but I still can't seem to recover, and a part of me doesn't want to recover. Maybe it's a little like Stockholm Syndrome - even though I keep getting hurt by him, I can't seem to let the love of my life go. If you had asked me, say four years ago, whether I would sitting here, pining away for this person, so deeply in love with him I felt like I was physically missing something, I would've laughed in your face. "That's absurd," I would've said. "I'm stronger than that." Turns out I was wrong. You can doubt anything you want, but you can't doubt the power of love - the power that brings even the most resilient of people to their knees. Everyone tells me I'm an idiot to hold on, to love someone who hurt me so deeply, so very much that I'm not sure I'll ever heal completely. I smile, sadly, and just nod my head in agreement. Are they right? Is each and everyone of them right to tell me to move on, to tell me I'd be better off with so-and-so, to tell me it's a waste of my time to keep on loving him? Yes. Absolutely. Each and everyone of them is totally correct. In my mind, I know this. I'm a pretty rational person; I know reason when I see it. Does it matter? "Doubt thou the stars are fire/ Doubt that the sun doth move/ Doubt truth to be a liar/ But never doubt I love."

Final thought: If thou remember'st not the slightest folly/ That ever love did make thee run into/ Thou hast not loved. From As You Like It