This Was No Accident

Love isn't an accident. Love doesn't just happen. Love doesn't work itself out. Love takes work. Love takes time. Love takes a conscientous effort. I absolutely hate it when someone says, "You can't help who you love," or even worse, "You can't control feelings." That's bullshit. A cop out people use when they realize they've fallen in love with the wrong person. I've made falling for the wrong person into an artform. No one says, "I knew better," more than I do. But never in all of my knowing better have I claimed that I just wound up head over heels one day, the result of a freak accident that occured while I slept. I can honestly say I never intended to fall, but it would be a lie if I said I didn't fall on purpose.
Don't get me wrong. I know that love can't be controlled, made to conform to what we want it to be. My heart has kept right on loving long after my head has told it to stop on more than a few occassions. But control was lost only after the decision was made to relinquish it. When I first started dealing with the Idiot, I remember the exact day I knew my feelings were involved. I remember sitting with Chesty LaRue in a restaurant in midtown Manhattan and realizing, "oh shit, I like this guy." I knew that there was about a snowball's chance in hell that it would work. But I chose to keep seeing him. I chose to indulge the way I felt. And when it blew up in my face, I wholeheartedly blamed him (righfully so) for being an asshole, but I never once blamed him for making me care for him in the first place. I did that all on my own.
Before you can fall in love, you have to have the "A-ha" moment. That moment where you realize "I might like this person." At that moment, you have a choice. You're standing at the edge of big a cliff, and you can either back away from it and stay on solid ground, or you can fling yourself off that precipice and pray to God that person catches you. Once you jump, there is no turning back, you're in a free fall where your emotions, happiness, and potential hearthache is in the hands of another person. But before the fall, there's always a choice to love or not. To keep going or turn around. Most times people barrell right over the edge head first, not giving it the least bit of consideration. It can make falling in love feel like something that just happened. But it didn't. There was a choice made, to not think and just feel. Sometimes that choice works, but more often than not it comes back to bite you on the ass. My cheeks are littered with teeth marks.
Some might say that when the "A-ha" happens that you have to follow your heart. Well, if your heart is anything like mine, it gets it wrong a whole lot more than it gets it right. Right now my heart is telling me to order a Pizza Hut Pan Pizza with extra cheese. I doubt my waist wants me to listen. Sometimes what we want isn't always good for us. That's why we need our heads to tell our hearts "no," before it's too late. Before our heart rules everything we do and we're trapped by all of its mistakes.
Yes, it sounds romantic to think that someone can't help but love me, crave me, need me. It's a rush to think that someone can't not love me. But when I really think about it, I don't want that. I don't want anyone to love me even when they don't want to. I want someone to put their heart in my hands, not just fling it in my direction. I want someone to say, "I'm choosing to love you."