PROLOGUE
When my friend once told me that he has fallen in love with a girl he (literally) bumped into; I looked straight at him enough to perform trephination at the sudden crack head convert and made a mental note for myself to pay close attention to my next Psychiatric Health class this week in order to save my pal's brain from destruction.
I mean, boy sees girl for the first time, and I repeat for the first time, then claims that he has experienced love at first sight. What kind of crap is that? Lust at first sight might have been a more appropriate term. Attraction, yes. Infatuation…maybe. Or other things, anything but love. How could you fall for someone you don't even know? You can't just fall in love just like that?
Love…
Love is overused in today's world. All I know is that love isn't the giddy and tingling sensations, the sudden impulse to see her in the middle of the night, the butterflies in the stomach, and all of those whirlwind of emotions. Love isn't about the chemistry, or the feeling of I-think-you're-the-right-one.
Love isn't based on feelings alone. It's like giving affection to your dog and not giving it dog food. It wouldn't survive. It's senseless, illogical, and irrational. Feelings are superficial. Feelings come and go.
It is not love.
Love comprises of compatibility, trust, partnership, respect, compromises and a whole lot of things and I can't name all. Love requires hard work and a great deal of effort .It takes patience to build it, mold it and does not come to its' existence in just a blink of an eye.
That's what I thought…before.
Now, I don't know what love really means.
I had undergone a tremendous change now, both in my beliefs and my life. And I never expected it to happen. I never thought that it would happen. An unidentified virus that was kept hidden for years somewhere in my body suddenly outgrew within me and rapidly engulfed my body, controlled my entire nervous system and molded me into what it wants me to be so I sprung into a new life, a new being, a new Mark Kanemura species, a new
...me.
How? I don't even understand it myself but I'll try to explain it as best as I can. Just like all stories, it all started in a place that is so common to us. In my case, a place that I would never thought that it would happen there: the Ol' New Yorker subway.