Painful Youth: The Girl in My Memories

What is love?

A pattern tacitly accepted by society? The drive of biological instinct? Or the attraction between souls described by Plato?

The love I discuss here is inevitably framed by the limits of my identity and perspective: that of a half-immature young man who has only just emerged from the hazy bewilderment of adolescence, yet has suddenly been weighed down by the burdens of the adult world.

My thoughts are a product of this in-between space.

I have questioned myself again and again, yet have never found an answer. What is it that clouds my perception? Is it the uncontrollable flutter I feel whenever I face someone of the opposite sex, as if it rises from deep within my blood and arrives as regularly as the tides? Or is it the inexplicable, heavy disgust that wells up inside me whenever I discuss "the opposite sex" with friends of the same sex?

But where does this disgust come from? They have done nothing wrong. Is this baseless, inexplicable aversion itself a deviation? A mistake that needs to be corrected...?