If you have to ask, then you're not in love. I've written about love. The feeling that no one else in the world must be as in love as you, that you certainly are asleep because the love feels like a fairy tale: that is love. I wasn't in love with Shawn. Not as much as I wish I had been. It was a crush, one I got over too quickly. I was stuck in a relationship with him for three and a half months, about two and a half months longer than I should have been. It was the fact that I had met his daughter that prevented me from ending things.

But I finally did. It was a long time coming. As I've explained over and over again, we didn't connect. No deep conversations. No bonding. No laughter. No discussions. No arguments. We couldn't talk about anything without it circling back to him. I wouldn't see him until I picked him up or went to him. He was a mat that lay on the ground, letting everyone walk over him. Even when I broke up with him, he just stared at me with blank eyes.

Emotion. That's what's been missing in his eyes. I was talking to Marissa today about that eerie look in his eyes when I broke up with him. I've never liked his eyes because I always felt there was something missing. That something is emotion.

Well, I was on a roll until I went to Facebook to see if I could find a photo of Shawn's eyes, and ended up going through all his photos while getting unsettled by his gaze in a few of them. It's interesting how things have changed...