It's A Disease... This Thing Called Love

Boys like girls, boys like boys, girls like girls, whichever way humanity chose to play; it was simple logic and reason, my biology, our biology. In the world before I didn’t even know about my love but for that year and a half it seemed to me she liked boys… not like she would tell me otherwise.

I don’t remember ever being told to like girls; I just did, before I ever had inklings what to do with the fairer sex I only knew I had a pretty babysitter. When I say logic and reason I suppose I mean on a cellular level, for love has never been made to reason. Mankind perhaps was not made for love at all but simply to procreate and such a thing as love was created to regain control but even back then we could not.

It would make perfect sense why my love did not love me; I wasn’t strong, all that smart, and honestly I had nothing to offer her, so in the clinical sense I was bad for breeding. Other boys, bad boys would say such rude things and I could never understand why; I spoke from my heart and they spoke from their libidos. Even then they were nothing more than animals, hidden behind human faces and my love was no angel… she was a BITCH.

To think of all the weapons that humanity has created, all the diseases that have been killing us and in the end it would be our biology that would destroy us. My love didn’t share my feelings and yet I was left to feel because I couldn’t fight my biology, the chemical love is.

“Do you like me” that never mattered back when there was no civilization a caveman would club a girl and that would be the end of it. There was such a dream of civilization and in my youngest days it seemed to work until the word “like” became “love”… before I realized such a terrible aspect.

What it must have been like no “she’s pretty” they didn’t ask for names, and there was nothing needed but the will, even if they did not understand it. We called the days before civilized but I still watched idiots, liars, and dangerous men take everything, even from men who were more financially secure, men who would be the fathers of a generation that would be much better off, men who women SAID were desirable until the next horror would come around the corner. Now there are no names, no need to bring life into this world, and not even the willingness of both parties concern; these men, women, children, if they can even be called human, don’t care anymore.

Strange that even in the fourth grade I would dream of a girl telling me she loved me, my mother didn’t count; even then I couldn’t get it. As I grew up there was always some girl I liked but I never gave up hope of this love, a dream I saw advertised every single day, when other high school guys were busy thinking about getting laid, all I wanted was some girl to lie with me. I gave up that dream until I met the last girl I would ever love; how I had thought I kicked the habit for years and then just the sight of her and I was lost, like everybody else.

No Internet, no TV, and no anything, perhaps The Abomination had been right, if I loved nothing then what threat would there be; on the other hand maybe he just sped up the process, in a civilized world he made me feral. “Do you love me” is the question I and millions of others were asking and like my love the world never answered but when it decided to the answer all I heard from those pathetic souls was “not yet.”

Marriage is the salve for the wound that love has caused, it was a type of life support, some patients lived and others died but it was by no means a cure… the sheer numbers of husbands and wives who ate each other was staggering. For those who truly did love each other the true horror didn’t begin until the ending of the world, another person to lose, to watch taken, or to give up.

How many times did I watch such passions die in the name of someone else; I was never dreaming of marriage in those days but how many times did I kill myself to be who I thought she wanted. I suppose, I hated being alone like most people and just to have someone I could call my own; living for someone else while I would die all alone anyway. Even if I had found someone to be with, I needed someone to love me for me, not to be empty, hollow, and starving.

I never cared about my own life but to imagine my love gone, if it was anything compared to the fear I had for my dog, I don’t think I could have taken it. Of course there were much worse things than death; to watch a lover die was a blessing considering the rapes, the eating, and the turning. Giving up was one thing but watching them return infected, starving, undead… love surely became a liability.

Most people were freed from some, an institution only to consider being institutionalized before their husbands, wives, or children ripped them apart. I realized a long time ago the dangers of love before there were dangers such as these in the new world.

To think how I once closed my eyes and imagined that there was someone out there for me; I imagined someone would love me someday. I always saw the truth and so does everyone else, when they close their eyes they see black; it’s all anyone wants to see anymore.

It started out with a kiss; I never closed my eyes for a kiss because I was never kissed and if I dared closed my eyes who knew what horrors I would see… better to see trouble coming. If something good was to come my way I wanted my eyes open so I could remember; it was the things that made me close my eyes that I could never forget though. Before there were beasts I imagined the girls that would love me; how the pretty girls didn’t want to see me and somehow I was shallow enough to believe that I would win the heart of the one most beautiful.

When people close their eyes now… most of them never want to wake up, because the sweetest lips can suddenly open to fangs and so much worse. Something good only meant something not infected, something you could have for a night, another moment of life, and then the question is why. It was easy to tell the infected but if there was anything human about them left, the eyes were always a dead giveaway and all they saw was meat.

Such dreams I had were vanity and surely I would have been a dangerous man in the old world, though I never was, everyone could see that. The horrors were no longer in the black but in the light of day; with your eyes closed if for but a moment there was nothing to fear.

Love was never meant to be business forms, contracts, and an obligation for love at its most basic was the preservation of life until death. Who dares dictate who one can love, when did love become more than a promise, and how was love transformed into a weapon of mass destruction?

It was always a business, the loving of another except it was no longer privately owned, it was bought, sold, and enslaved; perhaps better was the grave both then and now. I could go on forever about the power of words but a name; names our meaningless now in the age of bitch, slut, and whore; what about pervert, or offender, deviant, hell even master. As for obligations, I loved her that was my responsibility and then when I no longer could which of course was a lie, more to the point when I no longer should…

For the object of one’s affections to reject them was one thing but when parents, the church, blood ties tried to deny the love of one person to another well that is no longer the case as this dark paradise is painted well with the blood of those who dare. When love was given more to greed than the simple want and desire of two hearts it became nothing more than a commodity, a body and whatever once mattered. It might have been one heart too many, that lead to the collapse, one bad deal, just one more lie, the other guy or girl’s greed and it all came tumbling down.

Love was never meant to be bailed out and in this world if this is the bailout I don’t know where the love is going. No more words now only brands, signs, and graves, love has gone bankrupt and as for a promise of forever… lucky for fifteen minutes with someone the least bit likable.

Nobody wants to be lonely; from a scientific standpoint that’s true though I grew to tolerate it, to understand it, to want it, and all alone I died a little more each day. Strange that the lonely were survivors, maybe this was the meek, the weak, and the geek inheriting the Earth; there was no one to kill them in their sleep.

There was a time when the lonely would do anything for companionship but they were spared the horrors of killing those they loved and the want to kill themselves; always alone. It was as if the world was laid out before them and still they watched and waited as those they once wanted to be fought for their lives; trapped inside lonely little worlds, prisons became fortresses and to have what they needed and desired already at hand as if they too had been ready all along. No more laughter at their expense, no more silent rage, no more rejection as the lonely stepped into a world in need of them and as they watched the dead they finally joined the living.

As love has warped and corrupted those who did not understand so too others were taken not like the monsters walking but by the wants of a past world and without the restrictions of it. How they had wanted to be loved and while they still did there was no need to try anymore; for all that was left what else was there? No longer rejected and no longer spurned, call it love or not, they were no longer lonely and no longer wanting like everyone else.

Leave it to the end of the world for satisfaction to finally be had, virginity lost, and free breaths to be had, as disgusting as those breaths might be now. All I had ever wanted was one, one girl, one love, and one life and I was never worthy of that… someone for everyone but I was lonely.

Does it ever go away, I don’t remember when it first touched me, how many times I swore it wasn’t true, and how many times it returned but it was there…love. How much pain can the heart endure; before the end I remember I tried killing myself so many times and if only the heart could be lost maybe humanity could be saved.

If no one told me about her, her, or her, maybe if I had been blind and deaf, but I know it was bound to happen, the infection before the onset of the disease. Even when I acknowledge the word “love” as a lie, when I swore I would never fall in love again; it would come as a thief in the night. Never did a girl love me but there were so many and I wasn’t the only one, again it was biology if even for a night or a lifetime.

For the want of the strength of a heart, had mankind been so powerful we would have been immortal; while the brain bought the hordes down it was the heart that was the death of us all. The brain saw reason and the flesh was willing but it was the heart, that infernal drumming and skipping, that’s when there was trouble when the heart stopped beating; love, dead, or one of them. It wasn’t that love couldn’t get lost it’s just that it was always found again and again and thus mankind became lost.

No it wouldn’t go away, it couldn’t, and for a time it was believed it shouldn’t until the ending of the world and even then the tears wouldn’t stop, the blood, or the corpses. It became too much, if this was the fate of humanity then it could not be avoided but only endured until the dream ended and became a reality.

How many woke up with someone they loved that day, some weren’t even with people they liked, some were alone, others never got the chance to open their eyes, some lived some died. Was an ordinary day, not even Valentine’s Day, the moment the world, as a whole woke up to the truth about love, a day a long time coming, Sunday, July 19, 2009 at 11:23 AM

Ground zero was believed to be in the United States of America, somewhere in Alabama though no one could be certain; it seemed to be everywhere in mere seconds. In one moment lovers became others as in other ones and other things; other than human or perhaps even more so. There was no walk of shame only the run for your life as the infection took hold as love and hate, yes and no, pleasure and pain began to lose all meaning… unlike love.

I had known love but never like this before; will I admit it made things much easier only if you didn’t want to die a virgin… a much endangered species. How many days had I wasted loving a girl who could not, would not, and probably should not love me; I can’t even remember what I would have done if not for the end. What would she have done if she knew; it wouldn’t have mattered, hell she thought she had all the time in the world.

She could’ve been anywhere in the world and yet she woke up to this, I woke up to this but for once I didn’t want to go back to sleep. Day one, the day I first spoke Shakespeare to her but instead a yeah and a half later and love died or maybe it was reborn…

A reason to live… love; the reason that so many died… love, because in the end love has no reason and humanity had no reason to live anymore. For those alive that became infected, this disease took on truly a most horrifically sadistic nature.

How some believed in such a love of their fellow man; this was true insanity, a madness that could no longer be contained as the world had for far too long been overwhelmed with hate. What little love there was could not contend with the liars, the pretenders, and the girl I myself loved, want, need, and desire and now the world was full of “them”, what became known as the… "Loveless". It is strange to think of them as such, hopeless romantics, lovers, and dreamers that became nothing more than rapists, torturers, murderers, whores, and everything else.

Living, loving, more like lusting, insatiable, uncontrollable, and ravenous; if anything they only sought out to rape the living to death. Then there was the hunger, tearing, clawing, and ripping apart their victims as if somehow restoring themselves, filling the emptiness that they never could, alive or as the Loveless. The last symptom was fatal… to die and yet live on as the Loveless dead, or for their bodies to simply give out and explode in a hot bloody spray, spreading the disease.

The need for love and the desires of the flesh were the same as the need for bread and water, for air, and for God as those that followed “The Way” would say. It was believed with the explosion of the bodies somehow that might be closure until the dead, animals, and what was left alive, began to gorge themselves upon them.

Who are they… everyone, people I envied, people I could never find, and people I could never be, and millions of others in those bloody streets. What are they now… was there any difference, infected, rejected, but free of the constrictions that once held them, for once true, a moment I asked my love but the Loveless… whatever remained of their lives.

There were the men who had the women of their dreams; the fathers who had families, hell even the players who did treat pretty girls like sluts and whores, breaking hearts left and right. What about those sluts and whores, what about those good girls, and the fallen angels; the bad good girl? I had once dreamed a dream to win the last beautiful girl, maybe to save me or not, just one girl, me and her against the world; nothing more and nothing less.

I watched those men rip those same girls to shreds, families raped and murdered, and those players suffering the wrath of so many or becoming much more… primal. Infection took on a whole new meaning and if they did not become one of the Loveless, well flesh had a variety of uses in this new age, if they weren’t eaten. The man in the mirror I wouldn’t dare look at, even if I could… not as if anybody did look at me before the real monsters came out to play.

People have enough trouble remembering what now never mind who, it’s a dare to even try to remember, truly a dangerous thing. As for what, human, monsters, Loveless, if anything they are free and alive, what true freedom awaited them in the dark.

Chivalry is dead like everything else… Loveless don’t remember these things and honestly why did anyone else try, those truly in love and not. Still those still alive seek out such things good, evil, and whatever else may lie between.

Introductions are nothing more than predator and prey, hide and seek, and survival; for those found that words meant as much to the Loveless as they had meant to my love… too little, too late. Being caught by one of the Loveless was a death sentence but to be captured by more, dozens, sometimes even hundreds, if there was one gasp left, one body, a heartbeat, or even the skip of a beat. How many would be corpses would rise and if not Loveless what was left but to have it all happen again and again.

The good sought out companionship, supplies, but most of all a moment without fear; love had become a great fear but somehow just a moment with someone, if ever so small, was enough to bring a peace. A slave, sexual, otherwise, or both was better than being alone; some water, food, a moment of nothingness and masters were made messiahs. Then there was my love, her then everyone else simply trying to survive in a world that she knew was her responsibility… the death of the one and a world was lost.

Men couldn’t be men and women couldn’t be women so what else was there, when the world could lose such things; did it ever really matter? There was something, even if it was the simple fear of death in the midst of such things, which kept what now passed for humanity breathing in and out.

Damned, some more than others, bodies violated and ravaged, given to madness and rage, and the infection. I never wanted her as a victim but I was hers after all, doesn’t someone have to be or maybe no one at all, as if for me there was ever a choice.

Beauty, loveliness, and prettiness were more curse than blessing now, there was no more teasing at least where the Loveless were concerned and men as well, though anybody was a potential victim, all there was now is meat. Goodness and mercy were nearly forgotten concepts, those who had once been tortured by people who considered themselves better found they lie in a world where power truly has become absolute; how were they expected to behave? To be Loveless was yet another fate worse than death; some did not wait just as some didn’t before the days of the disease; murdered by others though those victims fingerprints were the only ones on the triggers.

If she could see me now, if she only knew the boy before, as if I were ever a man but for her I would have been anything she wanted; a wish come true as it were. She’s not one of them though not exactly, I consider her so much more and maybe that’s why I was damned, Hell before it was shared with the world. I was never her equal because I chose to be unworthy of her, my goddess like so many others choosing to love someone that could never be reached and why… because we lifted them there; damned to Hell to lift them to Heaven.

Quickly forgotten what people once were and to acknowledge our becoming, this was our damnation and yet where does salvation rest? In her eyes, in her arms, and in her heart but I was just one in a million who loved, who wanted and in the end knew what was to become Hell.

If only they had stayed there, the dead… with what right did the dead have the to be lonely, ranks ever increasing, a majority seeking unanimity, and who better to seek out love, having lost everything. These Loveless dead sought out flesh as well and like the others to fill that emptiness; first came their hunger.

In our last breaths, pieces and ashes combining, holding tight, and beating back to life the most hideous hearts to do such deadly work. The sheer taste of love, the blood pouring into the streets, the gutters, and the graveyards to those who rotted beneath the dirt, and craving more they burst from beneath. Wanting, needing, and finally feeding on whoever could be found, a second chance for some when so many others had never received a first because of love.

How they gorged themselves on their victims, peeling the flesh from their bones, organs ripped from inside, bodies being made hollow as the living lost heart…literally. Yet they were not sated, never to be satisfied but eating nevertheless and when there was no one left alive they would take from each other and even themselves. Truly the greatest fear was a return to lust; the dead were capable of raping the living…

Maybe all love had been stolen, betrayed, or forgotten but without it were we not all dead already, in truth it had brought me back when I dreamed of death and when it was not returned… The want of it or something like it can bring you back from anywhere but when the day came I was truly very much in love.

In love with who, that is the question, for everyone else it was simply who; the Loveless were not silent they simply could not be heard. Soon there was quiet and that is when people took notice of an answer, a miracle, something I had seen long ago and was not yet mine, and maybe never would be…

The endless screams that could be heard everywhere, the crackling of the fires as they burned away the world, and the millions of guns that did nothing to stop the hordes as they continued to charge, take, and feed. For hours there was flesh being pounded, fondled, and sucked until there was nothing left but bones and then the rattle of those bones… those that could still move as they sought out more flesh. Yet there was a word so small, so easy, and now so insignificant like it was to my love and for but a moment it seemed the answer to everything; it should have been.

When it was nothing more to feed the Loveless they gave the world its answer, more than the constant want, the truth of humanity, or our end; they spoke a word. What she had been for me was nothing short of a miracle but a miracle but not my miracle, my heart, and yet I dare to call her my love. It was her name, a name I learned to mean Christ bearer or Christ like; which made all the more except what sins had she yet to pay for, who had she truly saved, and the world chanted… Christa.

I want to believe Christa heard me, the world certainly heard the Loveless or perhaps saw them; that’s what it was, seen and not heard, unworthy of knowing until people were forced. When the world was made to be quiet, looking in the face of something or someone that only wanted love and their pleas were no longer enough, neither was laughter, jokes, or rejection, only the constant chanting, “Christa, Christa, Christa”.

Patient zero… maybe because no one could be sure if she were among the living or the dead; but I knew and deep down Christa knew it too, when it all began. The need for love, the betrayal of it, or maybe only a broken heart, how many there were at that single moment, when love fell.

Better to have loved but I never lost because I never had, maybe I didn’t understand, maybe no one does because no one ever answered the question… “What is love” this question. There was a question she answered that day but she wasn’t the only one, how many hoped, wished, and dreamed up until the last moment when everything but love started to die? Life and death took on whole new meanings after that day along with love because I have to believe I felt it but did she?

Like one more breath, one more moment, just one more day but there had been a year and a half; death could be considered a luxury if that’s what this was. Did the heart betray or maybe the heart is just stupid that’s why we have brains but meat was meat and all of what we are betrayed us; can’t trust ourselves yet we seek trust in each other. How is that trust rewarded… this would be the last time, let it fall to pieces and stay in pieces and yet the knowledge, the feeling, damn love was still there.

Maybe there was no patient zero only the first and then the last, the beginning and the end on that Sunday morning when the Loveless were born. Boy eats girl, girl eats boy, boy eats boy, girl eats girl, if only our biology, it’s a disease… this thing called love.

Copyright © 2011, Will A. Bradford Jr. All rights reserved.