When greed collides with love, it creates a perfect storm. It creates an unstoppable hurricane of self destruction and fear. It’s as though people actually forget that someone can love you but still act out of greed or personal interest. Unfortunately, no one is safe from this, because we are all the same -- human. We all want to watch ourselves succeed in the way our 10-year-old brains imagined it, even though we know it’s unrealistic and irrational. The resulting chemical reaction is what happens when greed collides with love.
Look at it this way: you meet the love of your life when you’re 16 years old. You think that God grabbed every beautiful aspect of the universe and put it into his or her eyes. That every birdsong and angel whisper ever uttered found its way to their throat and melded together to create the sweetest sounding voice you’d ever heard. You’re damn certain that the most beautiful sunsets had woven themselves into a perfect tapestry and lit up their smile with the most perfect, most mesmerizing shades of gold.
I remember the feeling -- the warmth that spread over my cheeks when he would smile, the chill that ran down my spine whenever he took my hand, hell, the way his lips took my breath away. I poured my soul into him, because when you’re 16, you think it’s going to last forever. You think you’ll be the exception to that rule everyone warns you about. But you almost never are.
You almost never are the survivor in that accident, and even though you may have been blissfully ignoring the coming of the end, eventually it does come. Whether you are blindsided by it, knew it was coming, or are the executioner, the end comes and changes your world.
Your breath leaves you as you try to inhale, as though you’re wrapped in plastic. The color flees from your face, your heart threatens to stop, and in fact does stop for a moment. Your brain shorts, and you start babbling, fumbling for words. Fumbling for something --anything-- to say, just as you did when they were only your crush. Only now you’re not excited. You’re afraid. You go completely numb and try to remain calm as the gavel pounds the wooden mark and seals your fate. Seals in the ending.
You start ignoring everyone and everything, and suddenly that person is all you can think of. They’re all you’re about and you don’t know how to change it. You’re convinced that you’re set in your ways, and you begin to wonder about who you really are. You begin sleepwalking. Their name becomes common vocabulary.
Some of your friends are worried about you -- they’ve never seen you so out of it. They want to help, even though you’ve convinced yourself -- and told them -- that they can’t. That you’re a lone wolf in this one. Other friends have grown annoyed with you, since all you do is talk about and Facebook stalk them all day. You tell them, just as you had convinced yourself, that you can’t help it. You’re still in love.
One late night, when you can’t sleep and are listening to the rain hit your window at 2:15 a.m., you start stalking them online again, combing through their Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And that’s when you see it. An innocent selfie of your ex and another girl or guy who bears a striking resemblance to yourself that you must’ve written off the last time you stalked the account. And then you look at the caption: “Happy 2 months, baby. Love you.”
It takes everything inside of you to not start hyperventilating. You click on the photo and find the person’s tag, and then visit their page and see that they are a friend of your friend’s. They go to the same high school and you do not. You go to school with your ex, but not them. Before you know it, all of your text conversations with your friend are thinly veiled, prying questions about your ex’s new relationship.
You realize you aren’t thinking within the best interest of the person you claim you love, and for the first time in God knows how long, you feel disgusted with yourself for doing so. But you don’t stop because you can’t help yourself. This is what you tell yourself time after time after time: you just can’t help it.
You stoop lower than you ever have. You start using other people’s affections towards you to make your ex jealous, or at least to level the playing field a little bit. You convince yourself that it is the love you still feel for them that is stopping you from dating when you know that the truth is you are harboring the false hope that they will leave their current SO and return to you.
As though seeing you with another person will open their eyes and incite a loving jealousy, or that being with this new person will remind them of what they used to have and of what they now miss. And you do all of this knowing they don’t necessarily miss what they had with you.
You try to convince yourself after realizing you are acting selfishly that you want what is best for them because you love them. You back away from them and stop meddling indirectly in their love life. You reach the realization that greed had concealed your love for them and vow to stop acting selfishly. And it is a hard, ongoing process because the battle between greed and love never rests. But battle on you do, because you simply love this person as much as you remember when you were 16 and sharing an ice cream sundae with them on a sticky park bench in July, with a dazzling sunset in front of you …. Oh yeah, and the sun going down just to the right or left of them.
