and if you find a love like mine/ just now and then drop a line/to say you’re feeling fine.
And when things go wrong/perhaps you’ll see you’re meant for me
I’ll be around when she’s gone. Billie Holiday

She's a runner, that one. The perfect prim and proper princess.

And she's the queen of unrequited love, be it the giver or the taker, either end of the spectrum, either end of both extremes. Its all she knows. To give love and not receive, or to receive love yet not give any.

Her past loves have come and gone and she has not quite forgotten the taste of their kisses. She could handle their desperate reaches for her physical self for she is ugly and sometimes it felt wonderful to be reached for and kissed, and sometimes she would succumb. But often, she would not, because in the not succumbing, there was power, and in that power, control.

Control was something she lost the first time she was in love, and the first time she had her heart broken, and she will die before she ever loses control again.

How childish. How can one love when one is too much in control?

Hush. Lets talk about her. Its not a discussion for us now, love, just her, all her.

Its quite sad to admit that at 21, thats all the love she knows. She's used to it, too used to it, to love and not be loved back, or to be loved and not love back. But never to love and be in loved in return. She's not quite mastered the art of requited love.

When in love, she must not let him love her. Thats the rule. She's used to the almost but not quite safety of loving someone wholeheartedly, yet without the tangles of real life and commitment, of the the future and the plans they must make. In the present, its fine, she knows he doesnt deem her worthy to be loved, and she is used to it that way. She is used to being in the background, but being there when he needs her. She knows he likes her, tolerates her even, and sometimes even craves her company. But if he so much as slips into loving her more than she loves him, their delicate balance will shift and she will ache to run free again.

When being loved, he must not know she loves him too. For she's used to the sanctuary of being loved and put on a pedestal, for though she knows she is flawed but in his eyes, in those trusting eyes, to him she is beautiful. And it is very rare for her to feel beautiful. She can do no wrong. She is an expert at making herself free (but not too free, cant make him know that to her, he is the world, and around him, her life revolves) for him and playing it just right. She blossoms in his prescence because it tickles her to think that for some reason, there has to be something about her thats tolerable, for why else would this boy profess to love her?

She collects their professions of love but doesnt know quite what to do with them. It is easier for her to be admired and share pleasantries and company, but it is hard for her to love and be loved in return. She is too damaged by the past and her past mistakes and mistakes thrust upon her and she has just not quite grown up. She is stuck in adolescence, almost, and thats quite a sad status to be given to a woman, stuck in the past and present.

Requited love is painful for her, has been painful for her, and she doesnt want it.

For when they fall for her and she falls for them, they see she is flawed, the pedestal she was on crumbles, the golden halo on her head was cheap gold painted. She's good at acting the part of the princess, its just that she cant keep up the charade once she lets her guard down.

The girl they thought she was becomes the girl she is, and its hard to say who was betrayed more here, the boy who realised the girl of his dreams doesnt quite fit into his reality or the girl who tested the boy of her dreams, would not let him in, and decided he was fit and loves him finally and hope that when he sees her, the real her, he would see beyond her facade and love her anyway, doesnt.

He loves the girl he fell for, the girl with a seemingly perfect life, with happiness and flowers and sunshine. He loves the girl she thought she was and was keen to be part of her world and this girl to be a part of his. He's with her, yet..he's taken, all the same. He's taken by the girl she was, and the girl she is just cant handle competing with herself, and before her can break her heart when he realises she is not what he envisioned, before they can go down the road of fixing what was broken, before they can be a couple and work through this together, she leaves. Before he can leave her.

And so it ends. And she runs again, waiting for the next unrequited love, because that, she can handle. She's an expert at being alone.

What did I tell you, in the beginning?

She's a runner that one, and she'll be one until she finds someone who will run with her, despite the flaws, can see past the facade and still love her anyway, from under the crumbled pedestal, cheap gold painted halo and all.

One day, maybe she will be more than a collector of cheap professions of love.