For the longest time, I’ve tried to convince myself that love is not a feeling, but a concept, and an ignorant concept at that. So for the longest time, I’ve let myself break hearts and I’ve let myself have broken hearts. Never once would I admit that the reason for these shattered pieces was the ugly act of love. Id break myself down and pass the pieces around, but it was hardly Love’s fault. For the longest time, I was a believer in nothing. As a teenage girl just into high school, it’s my job to laugh at love and call it cliché. Isn’t it? I let people in and once they get comfortable, id close the door to my heart with them on the outside, wondering what they’d done wrong. But that’s just it, nobody ever did anything wrong. I was naïve and I wasn’t perfect. It’s funny the idea of perfection, of course it’s not like I thought I was anywhere near close to the concept of being perfect. I just deemed love farthest away from it. It wasn’t until later that I realized it was I who was, indeed, farthest. See, it wasn’t until much later that I realized there is nothing more important than perfection. I never expected everyone who walked into my life to be perfect. It was nothing like that. I’m not sure what it was like, though. People were meant to be exactly like myself, I thought. It was the fear of falling in love, it was the fear of feeling nothing at all. Maybe if others ached from it too, did seem just a little less insane. Maybe, just maybe I wanted someone. Maybe I’d been waiting for somebody, anybody, all my life. But that’s what made me so distant, that want, that need, that made me so vulnerable. It weakened me and there was nothing I hated more than being weak. People came and people went and I never let myself be effected. I wasn’t effected; I refused to need anybody. I honestly believed that I was okay and I wanted nothing more than to be okay on