Fast forward a few weeks and things are painfully neutral between us. I would rather have things be over between us than this miserable in between.

And then I listened to this radio program on transome.org. If you have an hour to spend listening to something about love, it is mostly interviews and some dramatic monologues, it is actually very interesting.

I have been told my entire life that Love is the end-all of everything. This is where the fairy tale ends. This is where you become complete. This is where you finally love yourself perfectly. I am tired of holding love, something I am so far from, to those standards. I expect to find it someday, but I should also expect to be okay with life if I never do.

This is so unlike me. This ENTIRE journal is "andrea talking about the next boy in her life." This is clearly an obsession that I keep very much to myself except with my closest friends and in this journal.

I was trying to explain this to my friend Rory over dinner. I was trying to justifying why I had so quickly started sleeping with this boy Travis from our program as soon as I was having problems with Chris (yes, I did, it was lame, maybe a story for another day). I said that, if thinking about Chris was painful, I needed someone else to think about to help me stay sane.

He thought for a bit and said, "I guess everyone has to have their thing that they took way too seriously in their childhood and then changed the course of their entire lives."

In his case, he took the "you can be anyone you want to be" idea too seriously. "At every moment I feel like there are 700 different lives and 50,000 different dreams that I could be living"--- He is in love with adventure. He wants to pick up, like the narratives he loves, and leave at any moment with a single suitcase.

I am in love with love. I want someone to love me as unconditionally as I love them. I want to have a best friend for my entire life rather than just until I get bored/they do. I want permeant access to someone's arms.

This is suddenly no longer a life-long dream that I am proud of. It is a product of movie and literature and hallmark and ridiculous expectations.

So, I guess you could say, I'm looking for a new love, baby.

I am in the middle of Europe right now. It can't be that hard to find, right?