It is a rather odd feeling and one which I have never experienced before. Of all of one's thoughts being consumed by one person.
To say that I have never felt love before would be distorting the truth; there has been much poetry and sleeplessness and anguished mumblings into phone receivers to deny it. But all I've loved before has been in tidy little obsessions which petered out before the week ran out and before I ran out of reasons to walk away.
It is as though I have lived my life backwards. In adolescence I loved with the restraint of one who has lived and learnt and fears being burnt again. And in my adulthood I've come to give without a care for what I get in return. Is this what they mean by unconditional love? I don't quite know yet, but I think it is as close as one can get without.

Although it has been a long time since I've spoken to mum about anything more personal than the state of the weather, we've always shared a respectably vocal relationship.  We talk about aches and pains and careers and aspirations, but boys has always been a taboo topic. I remember the very first time she ever mentioned the possibility of me being with someone. Try as she might, she couldn't get herself to use the word 'boyfriend'. What ensued was a rather convoluted bit of conversation where neither of us was quite sure what the other was getting at.

To think that I must now talk not just about a boy but about a man-ling I want to spend my life with makes me shudder to the balls of my toes. Those being the only balls I can make any claim to possessing at said time.