100TWC - Day 18: Love

wow love i mean such an overused word i love you like in the song those three words they're said too much and not enough i love it where it could be anything you vaguely like or you're trying to impress the person who has it whatever it is and you don't really like it all that much but you're all oh yeah i love it baby i love it you love your friends that's a different kind of love to the love you have for your mum or your dog or your favourite pencil and then there's those weird kinds of love that some people have but other people that's most of us think are icky or embarrassing or just plain wrong those kinds of love have to be hidden away in special words with philia in them like necrophilia or coprophilia look it up or paedophilia not the kind of love i really want to talk about but then there's the usual kind and that comes in all different flavours too like love of your life and unrequited love usually love for the girl next door i used to think i loved the girl next door but it was just an adolescent thing really i only wanted to see her tits and she just thought it was kinda handy to have someone her own age living next door who she could play silly games with she never really loved me and in the end she moved away anyway and i never even heard from her again but i think about her from time to time but even that wasn't my first experience of love oh no i was only six years old when i fell in love the first time and my parents were all oh don't be so silly boys of your age don't fall in love but it sure felt like it to me when i was feeling all sick in my stomach and thinking about her all the time and making sure my fingernails were clean when i went to school and deliberately putting my tie on crooked so she could straighten it for me because she was a proper little girl who wanted to grow up to be a wife and mother and she'd seen her mother straighten her dad's tie so obviously that's the kind of thing you did when you loved somebody so she used to do it for me too made my head tingle anyway we only ever kissed a few times and then it all kinda blew over i never did really find out why she went off me for that other guy he even had dirty fingernails and she always told me she couldn't stand that i guess that's the thing about love you can have all these rules about the kind of person who's ideal and all that but when the right one comes along all those rules go out the window i used to ask my mum how will i know when i'm really in love and she used to say you'll just know that didn't really help me very much cos every time it happened to me i thought i knew but then it turned out i didn't know after all especially with that helen i used to let her do all sorts of stupid stuff to me just to try and spend time around her but then it turned out she was just making fun of me and talking about me behind my back saying how dumb i was to let her do all that stuff i used to get that sick feeling in my stomach when i was with her too but later on it turned into a different kind of sick anyway that was all a long time ago when i was only a little kid things got even worse when i was an older kid and i started getting all these urges i never realised it was so easy to mix up love and lust i spent a long time trying to sort that one out and it got me in one whole heap of a heck of a lot of trouble i can tell you i don't know what it was but when a girl kissed me i went kinda mad i think i remember reading once that love is a kind of madness or at least that hormonal buzz that comes with it you can get addicted to that a lot of people stay that way their whole  life like rock stars and film stars and other folk with a lot of money they always say they're looking for love in their songs and films but really they're just addicted to hormones or the thrill of the chase or something i don't think that's real love at all but then when you get to thinking about real love and comparing it to that flirty kind of young love and chasing about all over the place it can seem kinda boring from the outside you know when two people have been together a long time like them old folk you see walking along holding hands and people will say oh look at that old couple isn't that wonderful and all the young people start to feel a bit sick not the kind of sick that i mentioned earlier but you know kind of embarrassed and ewww and like that because all they can think about the young people that is all they can think about is the old people doing it and i think it's universally recognised that the thought of old people doing it is kinda yucky until you're an old person that is and then i guess it's perfect natural even though you don't do it as often as you used to but that's because by the time you're that old you've discovered that love really isn't about doing it at all that's only one very small part of it and all the rest the stuff that sounds boring to the youngsters well that's the stuff that love is really about caring and sharing and understanding and being gentle and kind and doing stuff for each other because you want to make their lives easier and taking pleasure from simple things like a warm sunny morning or a kitten playing or your grandchildren bringing you a daisy chain so all in all i reckon love means different things to different people at different times of their lives but it always means something to somebody at every time of their life and that's why they say it makes the world go round.