They say it's to better to have loved and to have lost. They say love is a force not to be reckoned with. They say love is the be all end all. They say love is the very boon of human existence. They say a lot of things, but I've learned to stop believing fairy tales.

It's not that I'm cynical or anything, quite the contrary. I'm actually a pretty nice guy. I mean, relatively speaking. I'm not a saint or anything. But I'm not a murderer either. I'm just a guy, I suppose.

Well, it's more complicated than that. A lot more complicated. I'm not trying to be uppity or anything, I'm just saying it how it is. It's a very perplexing predicament, life is. And I suppose what makes like so perplexing isn't necessarily any one event or moment in time, but the intertwining duality of life and death, adoration and disdain, love and indifference. And it's all because of a girl.

I was a rowdy, rambunctious little demon. Almost irksome in a lot of ways. I grew up in a one story ranch next to another one story ranch right by a third one story ranch, and these ranches branched as far as the eye could see: east, west, and north.

No house was particularly different from another, other than the occasional two story abode, and most of the homes were cheaply labored with crooked siding and a brick facade.

The roads were safe and the kids were nice, and besides the one incident just a few years back, rape and molestation and murder were, are and forever will be, rare.

My mom was a petty little thing of just twenty eight and my dad had long gone to escape the ravage duties of fatherhood. At the time, I wasn't quite sure why mom acted like she did. I assumed all moms were like that, what else was there to know? Apparently a lot. Soon I would realize the great fallacy that is my existence and the excruciating dilemma that is my mother, but that is a story for another day.

The cool, muggy air grasped soggy paws like a bear's first meal, pulling and ravaging and shaking, but never letting go. The sun was a meager disposition at the time, and couldn't b w bothered to break its long forgotten silence. The grass was a sea foam green, great waves of over-pruned lawns crashing haphazardly upon unsuspecting homes and ravenous roads. No one ever gave much thought to the bleak mediator which was the ever graying sidewalk, growing uglier and simpler with each passing winter.

But that day was too warm for winter, too cold for summer. The leaves weren't turning, so I can only assume it was spring, yet I have no recollection of gallant daisies nor awe struck magnolias. All I remember is the whispering of reluctant wind, as if to say, "Hello? I'm here! Can you hear me now?"

But no one listens.

I was just about to get on the bus that morning, me being a gruesome thirteen and school being a good ten miles away, when I stopped. It's not like I wanted to stop or anything. It's just, well, when you see beauty for the first time in a long time, you can't help but pause. Perhaps it's just human instinct or a boy finally under the ruins of puberty, but nevertheless, the moment was ceased, and I was there to take part.

At first, I wasn't really sure what to do. I've seen lots of girls before, many of them close friends, but I've never, well, I've never felt like this before. Not with a girl. Not with a guy. Not with anybody.

Of course, my obnoxious little friend didn't see a wink of it, and just goes on being obnoxious, blabbing about who knows what at a time where I couldn't really care less.

I patiently lounged in the sticky green monstrosities that raised above our adolescent heads and proved to be a serene sense of safety only found in the arms of a loving mother, but she never came. The bus just drove right by as if she never really was. Worst of all, she didn't seem much to care, and just waddled her way back to wherever it was she lived.

This struck me as odd, for I'd never met a girl who didn't attend school. Everyone went to school. Boys, girls, brothers, sisters, even mom had school on the weekends. But this girl, well, this girl was an anomaly, and I just couldn't let her go.

So each day I climbed those haggard stairs with a forlorn glance across the heavy street in a solemn stature of solitude, nodding politely at my friend's existence but neither acknowledging not hearing whatever it is he's droning on about. For two weeks I practice this same maneuver, hoping eventually something will change, but nothing ever does.

This strikes me with a haunting sense of guilt, as if somehow I am to blame for this whole massacre, but I couldn't exactly fathom any solution. Furthermore, I wasn't exactly sure what the word massacre meant, so I went on using it as an explanation for my wrought out exasperation and useless realization.  People just didn't understand the swollen tenderness of a heart broken long before it could ever be mended. People still don't really get it.

But I brushed it off as a brief case of sanity, one of the few times in life when I really did feel anything. After a while I just assumed it was the way things had to be, and I was never much for thwarting the inevitable. So I let bygones be bygones and soon forgot entirely about the girl, at least in the completely analytical sense.

But the heart isn't so simple. No, once the heart desires a sight it will grasp hold to till the day you die and puncture old wounds and salt fresh scabs and do whatever it takes to remember that retched moment when it seemed happiness was more than a state fantasized and imagined, but an actual state of being.

It took quite a bit of time for me to realize such a truth, and when I did, I did. There was no orgasmic epiphany or exuberant ecstasy, there just was. An acceptance, an understanding, a state of being. At that moment I knew exactly what I must do, no matter how little logic agreed. The heart gets what the heart wants, and I wasn't about to forbid the very thing that keeps me ticking. Plus, mom always said to follow your heart, and I finally had something to follow.

So I planned and collaborated and gossiped and assumed, and soon the whole town was on the look out for this girl. Big kids and little girls of all ages were united in the cause, no matter the class level or gender or race or intelligence. For once in our puny lives, we had a reason to be, and that be was an exhilarating be at that.

So the foray was planned and executed, with quite good taste if you were to ask me at the time. But the little ones were too excited and the big ones too horny, so not much of anything really got done. In the end, it was just me an a couple comrades who even set foot on land not our own. We were determined to find the girl, if only to prove my embarrassing emotions which one might interpret as love.

Weston had a couple of girlfriends at the time, and Jack was believed to be a player of sorts, but my young obnoxious friend of just eight years old was the real hero of the story, set on by the belief that true love really can be and be good, at that.

He was the only with both parents still around, seeing that they were in love or whatever, but that would change, as it always does, but not on this day. So he could only assume the uncompromising opinion that love is long and forever lasting, cutting past the worries and fears and misgivings. Of course, within the next ten years we'd all learn this truth to be an inalienable misunderstanding, and soon go off on our separate ways to become lawyers and architects and the like.

But on this day we were together in the cause, perhaps the only time in history, and united, we searched. First the vast expanse that was our neighborhood, then the neighboring yards and soon the whole city. Though our search was long, laborious and almost unbearably tedious, we searched on. Driven by some instinctual fear or desire or belief that somehow if we just found this girl, everything would be okay.

Weston would find his dad, Jack would find his sister, and the eight year old boy would finally come to learn the truth about love. What was I expecting out of the venture? I don't know. At the time, I thought it was about the girl. I always thought it was about the girl. But I guess time is funny in that way. It doesn't seem to abide by any truths until life least expects it, and now I suppose I'm expecting it less than ever.

We never did find the girl, Jack's sister, or Weston's dad, but we did learn something that day. Tired and resolute, we went home with the understanding that hard work can't get you everything in life, and most of the time it doesn't. The fact is, fate will have its way no matter what you do, and it's best you just accept it.

So we did a lot less expecting after that, each in our own special way. Jack stopped asking about his sister, Weston no longer looked in the crowd for his dad, and my young friend stopped hoping for the fighting to end, and didn't even cry when his parents finally did end their so called experiment.

What did I do? Well, I didn't do much of anything. Though my friends all seemed to leave with a lesson in hand, I had none. To me it all just seemed like a great big conspiracy set against time. I never did see the girl again.

As I pull lethargic legs up a weary three step staircase, I pause. The man in the blue suit sneers with mocking jubilation as he mutters something about moving on and having work to do. But I can't, caught in the mist of time. At moments like this, you have to pause, capture the moment, relinquish all sense of hurry. Beauty will have none of it, and the moment you wave it away, it's gone forever.

I smile a meager smirk, hand my card for evaluation, and lounge in a sticky green chair, patiently awaiting the long lost inevitable.

The bus pulls forwards some 100 feet to the west, and jumps with the lull of eery brakes. People mumble and scream and cry and make their way on and off and forward and back, searching for that girl I once sought so long ago.

The doors begin to close as I accept the futility of life, when I hear the faint knocking upon weary pane. The echo of a sweet voice pleads and begs and soon the old man gives in, stopping again at the insistence of a voice which asks for nothing but a maybe.

The door spurts open and my eyes jut wide, smiling at my luck.

"Hello." I offer.

"Hello." The girl smiles.

"I've been looking for you."

"Funny. I was just about to say the same thing to you."