Is love real?

I'm glad it's taking a long time for summer and now fall, to pass through town. In September I was dreading the change of seasons: one more season Jesse would not see. One more step away from his time alive. I'd rather not move forward.

People say that those we lost live on in us, in our memory, but how, really? It's only the memory that lives on, certainly nothing of the real person. Sometimes I do really feel Jesse's love all around me but is that real, or is it some kind of emotional buffer my mind creates to protect me from his loss?

I think of what it was like as a teenager, crushing on someone. I remember convincing myself that if I felt "love" strongly enough, that it would somehow affect that person too, that he would feel love toward me because I loved him so much with a love that would last for all eternity. Of course, a month or two later, I'd have totally forgotten him. So whatever that transcendent feeling I'd had, it either wasn't really love, or love has to do with what's within us, more than the object of that love, or both are true. We call something love, and adorn it with mythology and neediness and hope, but the feeling we have inside is something else.

In a way, mourning a lost loved one is like an unrequitable crush. There's no hope of reciprocation, your life is warped around an emptiness that nothing can fill. You satisfy yourself with pictures, memories, maybe hope, but you're not really in a relationship with the object of your longing. You stay in stasis, because regardless of what you feel, nothing can move forward. There is no "there" there. No reality to check your feelings against. No one to communicate with, to rediscover, no one to save, no one to save you.