When you hear or say a word too much, it stops sounding like a word and you question it, yourself, like, “am I spelling it wrong, am I saying it wrong?” and then “is this even a word?” that’s so odd, isn’t it? Why does that happen? Don’t tell me why. I don’t actually care, really, I’ll read the Wikipedia page or something later. What I’m thinking of, though, is how that kind of happens with people. When you’re, say, falling in love with someone, you want them around, you want to spend time with them, see them, hear them, listen to them. When you’re falling out of love with someone there’s this balance of them being around and you being like “no, yeah, I do still love them, I still want them around, look at how great and wonderful they are!” until suddenly a moment while they’re there and all of a sudden you can’t stand them. You want them gone, you want them to just leave you alone and your heart and your stomach and anything that was held up in the clouds by balloons of magic and miracles have their strings cut and they drop down with the force you would swear the ground shook. But you look around and everyone’s just fine. No one else felt your world collapse, no one else can hear nothing but the sound of your breath chafing against the walls of your throat and your heart slamming itself into your ribs, desperately trying to escape the failing machine that you have become and get somewhere it’ll be safe and protected again—somewhere inside the person you’ve just fallen out of love with. I don’t think it’s that you get sick of someone, I don’t think that love is doomed to fail. I believe in love and practice it often. But there’s still this fascination on some level with a specific thing, with a specific set of letters that form something (in the case of a human, A’s, C’s, G’s and T’s wowow DNA jokes) that for some, whatever reason gets lodged in your brain and doesn’t let it focus on anything else. It repeats this thing over and over, turning it around and around until suddenly it’s different, it’s changed even though it’s remained exactly the same, but now it’s weird, foreign, doesn’t make the same sense it did just a moment ago and you’re still somewhat fascinated with it, still intrigued, but only until you realize that there’s just too much of it in your brain and you gotta get rid of it for a second, you’ve gotta forget it ever existed for a moment, before it can mean something again. The only issue is that the word will wait for as long as you need. It’ll be there when you’re ready for it to be. The word will always become something again, it will always mean the same thing. The human may not be so reliable.