i wish i could do better by you ’cause that’s what you deserve.

you can never love anyone enough. your love cannot fix anything, nor does it start the healing process. love does not stop time; it barely even manages to slow it down -- and often times, this is not enough. love will not help anyone see the good in you. you cannot love someone into apologizing, backing down, or compromising. love does not uncover the details because it lives in the empty spaces between. love will do its best to convince you otherwise though, but trust me: you can never love anyone enough. they have to love you.

but love tends to be a packrat -- collecting things that long should have been tossed away. it will make you see things, hear things, understand things that have no basis in reality, leaving it up to you to tell the difference. it will make you beg. it will make you listen to really awful songs and write down terrible things on crumpled restaurant napkins. it can make you sacrifice. it will, undoubtedly, ruin a good movie and make a bad one oscar-worthy. it can also make you give up your self-respect, and once you lose that, you have lost everything. love is your one-way street toward oblivion. that is, unless they love you back. otherwise it is nothing more than a series of events that you once lived through.

with that said, you should be careful with what you are willing to give up -- the human condition appears to be keen on forcing you to make the most agonizing decisions at the worst possible time. geneticists call it the self-destruct gene, a chemical reaction consisting of equal parts passage of time and giving up too much, that transforms love into resentment. like one-way streets, you might reach a dead end, and if not, you certainly cannot turn back. so in your pursuits, be careful with what you think you are willing to go without. as is often the case with hindsight, you may have made some terrible mistakes.

familiarity and sentimentality have a tendency to fade into nothing more than journal entries filed away in dusty memory banks, occasionally retrieved only with the right song lyric. the truth is, most things in this life will to break in their own time. the pieces all shatter with a noisy crash and scatter with a reckless abandon at your feet. sometimes it is better to replace broken things than invest the time and effort in putting the pieces back together. but mostly it is because love lives in the empty spaces, and sometimes, some of those broken parts may have fallen through the cracks already. in the end, you may find everything disastrously unrecognizable when you think you have it all put back together.