Musings on Life and Love

This started out as a comment over at Misty's place, but it got ridiculously long and went way too far off topic...I'm pretty sure that I have already used this title at some point, and my images were exceeding uncooperative, but I have other things to do today that are not nearly as interesting as musing about philosophical concepts...

The other day, I was thinking about something in the general vein of being afraid of need and something being too good to be true...Only, unlike her posted thought process, mine sounds way stupid in print.

Around the time that I met Alpha, I made a conscious decision not to ever fall in love. Now, I suppose that doesn't sound so bad until you tie in my reasoning--I wasn't afraid. I wasn't afraid of life's tragedies, of the things I couldn't control, of losing anything or everything, and most of all, I was completely unafraid of death. However, I was afraid that love would change that--love would create need and dependence. So, since being in love was obviously the most terrible of Achilles heels, I was determined to never actually feel it.
For a while, it worked. And it was terribly heartbreakingly unfair to him. I decided that maybe it was better to give in to the thing that brought me so many fears, instead of letting my life revolve around fear of those things. And regardless of whether or not I actually deserved him, for some inexplicable (to me) reason, he had chosen me.

In retrospect, I was right, of course (couldn't resist and opportunity to say I was right. Clearly). I am now ridiculously afraid of losing him, of death and any such journey that either of us must inevitably take without the other.

Yet...Which is really worse--to deny oneself the feeling of actually being alive that comes with needing something so overwhelmingly much from someone and never actually allowing oneself to feel the need and looking back on life only to realize that we never truly allowed ourselves to LIVE because we were too afraid to do so?

Or knowing that it was glorious and beautiful and it hurt unimaginably badly and we bled for it, cried for it, gave it our all until our existence was merely the dust of that feeling and we flew through the stars; even knowing that eventually the landing would crush our hearts? Because it will, of course. Nothing we know, love, or experience will last forever as we know it. Nobody lives forever, and nothing is immune from the sands of time. But the trick, I think, is to really be alive. It is better to crash into dust like a flaming star across the sky than it is to skate carefully to one's end--because one would have spent too much time dead already.

Anyways, who's to say that what we see as the end is not really just the most terrifying and beautiful beginning, something so vast and beyond our thought processes that we simply cannot comprehend it until we become it...?

Above all my fears so vast, this...