Love (n.)

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I was in a nervous state during our class, making it hard for me to concentrate on whatever our professor was babbling about. This nervous state carried on all day long causing me to almost lose face during board work, trip on the stairs, and more or less destroy a very expensive laboratory equipment in the university’s physics lab.

I didn’t know that a person can, just by being ridiculously endearing, cause this much confusion. Was I in love like Jinki said?

Far from it.

They say that when you’re in love, you’d know it. You’d feel it in your heart. But what people fail to consider is that the heart cannot understand such complexities. Hearts are practical and they were made to keep us alive. Love, as absurd as it may sound, seems like a choice to me.

You don’t get to choose your life but we can choose how to live it. Normal is not exactly what I would describe my life to be. I grew up in a household with a neurosurgeon and an evolutionary biologist as parents who know very little of child rearing. I do not resent my parents, they’ve given me everything I could imagine having – a good home, occasional luxuries, enviable education, and superior genes. That is why, it is always a wonder for me when people ask me how difficult my life is, considering my parents are always busy. The answer is, my life is not difficult.

My parents happen to love what they do, and I respect them for that. Sure, we rarely see each other as my father is busy saving lives and/or imparting knowledge to future surgeons and my mother is mostly exploring the world, researching. But what they lack in attentiveness, they make up in knowledge. Both my parents understand the value of knowing, thus they let me do basically anything – from going to other countries to join physics conventions, to experimenting, and to even set-up my own laboratory at our basement. I, in turn, do my best to hone my craft and make sure that their trust is never broken.

As of my emotional needs, well, I have little need of them; partly because I was wired that way and partly because I see little importance in emotional frolicking.

That is, until I met Minho.

Minho: he who was so loathsome with all his undeterred romance, soothing words, and endearing gestures. I didn’t know for sure whether I love him, but I care for him –so much that it scares the hell out of me. What if I loved him and didn’t work out? Where does that love go?

There’s a reason why I’m very good at being alone. It wasn’t because I am used to be left alone, nor because I thought people cannot make me happy. I thought that, maybe if I loved it will consume me and that when I am out of it, I will fall apart. It’s more convenient living a life with little emotional attachment, because then you are free to do as you want without thinking of people’s feelings. You learn not to lean on it and shape your world around it. Because what if you make love the center of your life and then you realize it was not there to begin with? Would anyone be able to survive that kind of pain?

But one must take risks right? Even if the risk is having your life be potentially destroyed because your emotional pain is too much to take.

That is why I decided to confront it, like the brave person I believed I am. I needed to speak to Minho. After all my classes were over, I asked the driver to take me to Minho’s house. Once there I plucked my courage up and walked towards the door. I knocked. There was no answer. I knocked again. The door opened and there was Kibum standing and looking disheveled, holding a puppy.