Love has always been a bit of a mystery to me. The way I was brought up, it seemed that love was a sacred thing that belonged to God, and nobody could know love but through him. I was taught that one day, someone would be there, and I would love them and want to live with them until I died. I couldn’t imagine what that was like. I already knew a lot of people who I liked very much, and would quite happily spend the rest of my life with but no, this was going to be different than that. But it never happened like that. Nobody ever stood out from the crowd as being so special that I liked them more than anybody else.

I concluded that it must be something beyond my will and in the hands of God. One day he would just pick someone and let me know about it, and I wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore. This was a huge relief, because I knew I could just get on with my life instead of wasting time finding a soulmate; I could mind my own business happily. I still didn’t really understand why one needed a soulmate though, unless one wanted to reproduce. I don’t really think reproduction is particularly useful for somebody like me though, my genetics aren’t particularly good, and besides, there are plenty of other people breeding that I need not contribute to it.

Anyway, years passed and God never picked someone for me—apart from one or two times when I thought he had, but it turned out it was just my subconscious projecting; it was just that I was thinking, ‘Well, why not this person then? She seems as good as any.’ Eventually my belief in God evaporated, but my attitude of minding my own business, so to speak, stayed. And the years rolled by, and I continued to mind my own business, pursuing my interests. I have many interests—too many, in fact—so I never really thought I was missing out on anything. All of my friends were constantly in and out of relationships and it seemed like a huge waste of time to me. Why ruin a perfectly good friendship by turning it into a relationship? Half the time, the relationship ended, and they could not bare the sight of each other anymore. Worse than that, sometimes people—often good friends—would become attracted to me, and then when they found that I did not reflect that physical attraction back to them, they became embarrassed or ashamed, or sometimes even angry, and I would thus lose what was once a good friendship.

My body is a breeding-ground of ideas, and they come to me occasionally. (Well, I like to think so anyway, the reality is probably that I just spend a whole lot of time daydreaming instead of actually doing things.) I nurture those ideas as though they are living things, and if they are strong enough, they will grow too big for me, and I will have to let them go. When an idea is matured enough to leave my mind, I look for suitable people to share it with—people who will treat it with the love that I treated it. I get a certain amount of satisfaction in relating my thoughts to people. The amazing thing is, that afterwards, the idea will either become a part of the person I shared it with, or simply fade away. Maybe they fade away because they are bad ideas, or maybe they were good ideas, but I communicated them badly. Therefore I must plant these seeds in as many minds as I can, if I want my ideas to live. That way I will gain more experience relating my ideas. When I am not either letting my mind wander in order to catch an idea from whatever it is in which my mind resides, or tending to my ideas, or relating them, I am gathering the ideas of other minds into my own, that is knowledge—or at least I think it is. How could I possibly have time to care for someone when I am too selfish to get out of my own head? I’m perfectly happy here; it’s warm and beautiful, and the windows are quite nice, and it’s even got some legs to move me around if I get tired of the thing that is in front of me. Maybe I will be selfish forever, maybe that is my destiny. Or maybe my mind, that is constantly metamorphizing in a slow but constant state of change, will change so much that one day I will be ready to attach myself to another person forever.

I get to where I’m going by walking away from where I’ve been. I think it was Winnie the Pooh who said that. That quote resonates with me, because I think of myself as a sort of wave, making its way through time, picking up things and carrying them, and discarding others. I cannot really predict what the things are that I pick up and cast off are, because it all seems more or less out of my control.

But I do have love in me, but it’s not like the love people around me seem to experience, at least from what I can gather. I know that the chances of me being alive are approximately zero, and yet here I am, that is amazing, and I love that I am here. The world around me is so beautiful and I love it. I love the fact that there are other people around me. It’s amazing that I can have a thought and place it onto a page in the form of writing and that someone else can look at the writing and sometimes get a glimpse of what it feels like to be me. I don’t need a relationship in order to feel love, and frankly, I think the thing that most people call love is not love at all, but desire. The only thing I desire is to know the things I’m too dumb to even ask about.

Maybe there’s something wrong with me, but I don’t see it that way. I think the only thing that makes us human is that we can look at ourselves and ask ‘What are we?’ And look at the universe and ask, ‘What’s it doing there? And how did it get there anyway?’ And then we can spend endless years trying to find out, and that, to me, is love.