Chapter 2: Am I In Love? A Quiz.

This is the second chapter in a series of loved-themed short stories that revolve around a central plot, and, hopefully, act as a modern guide to the do's, don'ts, and do multiple times, of love.

A Young Lover's Guide To Love.

 

Chapter 2:

 

Am I in love? Or Am I in sex? A quiz.

 

      Shakespeare once famously asked, "Tell me where is fancy bred, in the heart or in the head?" While this is an excellent question and one you could spend the rest of your possibly post-graduate life pondering while trying and failing to adapt to the job market, it is almost more important to determine if what you feel for this person is really just fancy, or may in fact be something much more. Can you agree with the bard that "love is not love which alters when it alteration finds," or are you simply looking to unbridle someone's knickers and snog?

 

      This question, then, maybe more than most, can be decidedly difficult to answer. What is love? How will I know what feels like? How will it smell? These are then important concerns, and in an effort to avert you from the incredibly painful mistake of discovering you truly did love someone only after they have left your life forever, here is a convenient quiz. Was it love, or, are you only in love with the idea of loving someone?

 

      Instructions: review each question below and take as much time to answer them as you need to. This is not an actual test and you will be not graded, or degraded, for this so you don't have to physically write your answers down. There is the chance though that it may help finally get the truth out of you. Please answer each one as truthfully as possible to ensure an accurate response, as, well, you're the only person who is likely to read this so you have no one to lie to. Don't worry, however, as with enough hard work and hopefully, this book, you soon will.

 

      If after review of the quiz below you find yourself truly incapable of answering those hard-to-reach questions in your heart, a scientifically-proven alternative has been offered to ensure results. What you'll need for this method will be a pair of scissors, some regular, clear tape, a cloth blindfold, a large number of sharp objects and, depending on your age, your parent’s participation. In this case, you'll notice that the answer portions for each question appear incrementally larger than the regular text, so please proceed to tear out each answer separately, using tape attach them in random fashion to a corkboard. If you do not have a corkboard handy, please feel free to get creative and utilize a nearby dartboard or, should you strongly dislike your roommate, your roommate’s bedroom door. When each have been attached and set in place, please place the blindfold on over your eyes. Please remove any glasses you may be wearing before doing this. With blindfold in place, take the sharpened objects you have (i.e. darts, well-sharpened, officially certified throwing knives or expensive silverware) and throw at the designated target.

 

While I as the author can take no responsibility for any damage done from either the results of the quiz or the manner on which you reap them, feel comfortable in the knowledge that despite the risks taken, you are at least on the way to the relationship you have always craved and hurtling in the opposite direction of the soul-crunching heartbreak you fear most.

 

      As such, using either method should yield a wildly accurate assessment of the strength of your feelings with deviations appearing solely based on how much you've had to drink.

 

Good luck, and go get em', Private.

 

 

One: Do you believe in love at first sight?

 

      A: Absolutely. I’d go as far as to say that as soon as I was in the room with the person I am currently and devastatingly in love with, I knew they were the one for me. The smell of their hair and the warmth of their aura drew me in. When I saw them that first time at the hardware store while we were both waiting for ant traps, I felt safe to say that my long marathon from total loneliness was finally over.

 

      B: Yes. Though it can take years to work out a solid and healthy, long-lasting relationship, I knew by the shape of their abs that I was in love.

 

      C: No. You cannot tell by look alone whether someone is truly the person you are meant to be with. Love is like a nectarine in the dark: you can’t tell if it’s bruised, or something inedible and inappropriate to place in your mouth, until you try and take a bite.

 

      D: No. Love, like myself, due to an unfortunate skateboarding accident in my youth, is blind.

 

 

Two: While you wait at a local bar or restaurant, someone you find incredibly attractive comes up to you and as if written into the screenplay of your life, starts to randomly chat with you. This person is absolutely beautiful, however, beyond that you know nothing about them. Within a moment of idle conversation, you tear your eyes away from their perfect, physical extremities long enough to hear what they are actually saying to you, and you catch them ask you for your phone number. You know you are currently enamored with another person, the person you believe you may be in love with someone you / are in a relationship with/ secretly stalking/ created from a combination of celebrity and action figure fantasies. Do you:

 

      A: Advise the person they are handsome and or gorgeous, however, your erogenous zones are the emotional property of someone else. As such, you decline their offer and instead simply resign yourself to watching them at all times until they eventually leave the establishment.

 

      B: Take their number, but advise them that while you are otherwise emotionally taken, you have a friend who would absolutely die to be seen with this person, let alone call them. Tell this person that you will pass their number along to your friend instead, and resign yourself to watching them at all times until they eventually leave the establishment.

 

      C: Take the number with the intent on throwing it away at your earliest opportunity so as not to cheat on the person you are with, but, still use the opportunity to flirt almost constantly with this perfect example of human form.

 

      D: Take their number and then, as the night goes on, accept their invitation to Paris to dance, drink and laugh as you were never allowed to in your previous life, only to wake up naked and tied to a phone booth outside of a rural town with a name you cannot begin to pronounce, waiting for the proper authorities to arrive and place you in jail and laugh maliciously at your misfortune until life no longer wants you. You will die alone and in misery, sure, but, for that one, magical night, you truly lived.

 

 

Three: How often would you say you think about the person you love?

 

      A: AllthetimeJenniferMalloy.

 

      B: Whenever you see a cloud pass by in the blue of the sky and remember you are never really alone, whenever you look at the bruises on your elbows with secret relish and remember where they came from, whenever you eat a carton of fig newtons, you think of your loved one. Wherever there is a taste, a sound, a sight or a scent that reminds you that you are alive, there you think of your lover.

 

      C: At least once a day, simply because that’s roughly how often you injure yourself painfully. While you have never completely understood your connection between physical pain and sexual gratification, you recognize its existence and deal with its consequences.

 

      D: Almost never. You care deeply and passionately about this other person, but to even think about them is literally enough to legally break your most recent restraining order.

 

 

Four: The person of your dreams has been away for some time and is scheduled to return this evening with plans for a specific and romantic time specifically and romantically with you. You:

 

      A: Take a long, luxurious bath and spend most of the day in prepping yourself for the big night. You trim your nails, body hair and excess drinking all in preparation for your date. You can never be too excited about something or someone you love, and you are love’s remembered prisoner. You have a dress or suit picked out just for this occasion and haven’t even tried it on since you have borrowed it permanently from your best friend. This, this will be night worth waiting for.

 

      B: Written a long but heart-felt poem inspired by the return of your favorite person. This will almost certainly have no effect on them whatsoever, however, your soul burns with artistic expression and desire for your loved one and you simply must get it out. Devotion is just another word for a new dress you can’t afford but wear anyway just to impress someone.

 

      C: You contact a lifelong friend who is currently possessed of a high-ranking position at a local veterinarian’s office and has a well-known history of petty theft...

 

      D: You clean your home in excited preparation, ensuring that none of the forgotten clothing or other keepsakes your many and often transient sexual partners have left behind are in obvious sight.

 

 

Five: When your love is near and brushes up against you, their hands sensually but accidentally caressing the inside of your thigh while you have your feet up in stirrups in their office, or their legs rubbing up against yours when you meet up in line at the same coffee shop, how does that make you feel?

 

      A: It’s as if you’ve been struck by lightning...sexual lightning. Your blood begins to race, your skin gets clammy and your breath gets fast. You have to remind yourself to check your pulse, in fact, because this suddenly reminds you of your last several heart attacks. Yet with each second the two of you remain in contact, you know at least this one thing: you don’t want it to end.

 

      B: You blush. Your face turns as red as a fire engine made of skin the moment they bump into you. It may have only lasted a moment, but it was enough to at least get you excited for more. You know you’re not sure if they feel the same way as you, but, when it comes down to the nitty-gritty, you would do almost anything to see what they look like when they shower.

 

      C: You cannot help but notice them, but beyond that, you ignore the sensation. You have strong feelings for this person, but a simple rub up isn’t enough to change the direction of your life.

 

      D: You reach out and strike the person as hard as you can in the face or throat. Sure, they’re attractive, smart, funny and have incredible taste in music, however, if they violate your comfort zone then they have to deal with the years of physical therapy the facial reconstruction surgery will require.

 

 

Six: Your loved one has been captured by Somali pirates. While embarking on a race to benefit the American Cancer Research Institute, their yacht has been hijacked and it has now been over twenty-four hours since they have last been heard from. After a careful monitor of local police radio in the area, you have verified that a list of demands has been made to various law enforcement agencies, however, at this time, the b******s don’t seem to actually be making any effort to deal with the nautical terrorists. What do you do?

 

      A: You contact some friends in the area of Florida City and immediately make arrangements to stay with them for roughly two weeks. You rent a dependable car from a nearby dealership, a common vehicle but one with a lot of interior space, most likely a Dodge Durango, and you leave the very next morning. You spend the first week checking in with the official chatter between the government agencies involved as well as stock piling supplies. Your first concern in that area will be weapons, so you purchase them only after you arrive in Florida, as they have no legal requirements for you to have a permit to purchase them, and you do so at a local gun show instead of a shop to avoid the mandatory waiting period.  You purchase two matching .454 Casull handguns due to their incredible stopping power as well as a pump-action Mossberg shotgun. These items will be expensive of course, however, you know in your heart of hearts that you really can’t put a price on saving your love with the use of gratuitous violence.

 

      B: You review your current bank statements and after moving enough for your most recent month’s bills and rent into your savings, you open a checking account at a separate bank under a false identity and deposit every other penny you have into it. Later that afternoon, you then use that account to purchase as many Bit Coins as you can, Bit Coins being an almost untraceable form of online currency, and with your newly purchased monies you review the “Contracts” portion of Backpages . com, a website designed for use with a discreet clientele. You use your Bit Coin balance to purchase any contract looking for hire in the southern Florida region, looking specifically for sellers advertising in problem solving and conflict resolution, preferably ones with a military background. While you yourself wouldn't go and track down foreign devils who kidnapped your love, you do have a bank account and the internet access required to hire a hit-man, and as such, experience counts.

 

      C: You fret constantly, ordering subscriptions to every local newspaper available in your area and setting your TiVo up to record any and all news channels that may provide a vital update. You also create and stick religiously to a contact schedule for when and how you contact the police and Coast Guard, reaching out to them for news and pressing questions every half an hour, alternating between agencies, allowing no call to last less than two minutes. You know that though you cannot directly affect the outcome of your love’s life-threatening situation, you can at least do your absolute best to try and push those who can into action as well as keep yourself informed of any and every chance they have at freedom.

 

      D: You eat lunch.

 

 

Seven: The Coast Guard, in direct cooperation with the US Navy, has cornered the pirates who captured your true love and forced them to take refuge on the island of Saba, a tiny and tropical getaway with a population of less than two-thousand. The pirates, unbeknownst to the combined forces pursuing them, have a heavily-fortified base on the island and have gone underground with their captive. The various officials you have been able to persuade to help you have advised they are at a stalemate currently. As you start planning your next move, word reaches you from a news station that the pirates have sprung a last-minute and surprise escape via a stolen, Russian submarine. What do you do?

 

      A: Using the information you have borrowed from the hacked email account of a local and lonely federal agent you met on AdultFriendFinder . com, you verify the exact coordinates of the Somali’s submarine based on current US sonar readings. Next, you reach out your local musician’s shop and purchase a used guitar amplifier, a standard microphone as well as a twenty millimeter Piezo disc pack. The underwater voice communication system consists of an underwater speaker or solids transducer wired to an amplifier and then to a microphone. You simply activate and speak into the microphone and your voice is amplified and sent to the transducer and broadcast into the water just like a public address system would use speakers to broadcast you voice into the air.

 

With the battery-powered, guitar amp and microphone in tow, you drive out on little sleep to Miami Beach, Miami, and assemble your homemade underwater telephone system. Using Morse code, as you were made aware by the same federal agent that at least one of the pirates has an American military training, you reach out repeatedly trying to get the submarine’s attention with the coded message “Bienvenidos a Miami.” Knowing that one out of every twenty people are almost guaranteed to enjoy the music of Will Smith, you knowingly attempt to bring the Somali Pirates, of which you have discovered from TV news briefs there are in fact twenty of them on board the vessel, to the beaches of Miami with the use of the chorus from his hit song “Miami” as a thinly veiled subliminal suggestion. As you have heard from your source that the pirate’s coordinates placed them close to the Florida Keys, you are not surprised at all when the Coast Guard apprehend the submarine and its criminal occupants later that afternoon off the coast of Key West, apparently, on their way to Miami. Your love is tired, hungry, and sore, but in good spirits and incredibly happy to see any sign of friendly life, or, lacking any other option at all, you.

 

      B: You spend the next ten to twenty hours searching through both oceanographic maps in and around the South Pacific as well as ancient Sumerian texts. After locating the required information, as well as buying a very specific, octopus-shaped stone idol from eBay seller AbdulAlhazred69 and having it shipped overnight, you borrow your brother’s fishing boat and embark on a trip to Ponape, a small island in the Federated States of Micronesia. You arrive at a little after five p.m. and after a break for dinner at Coco Marina, the largest restaurant among the few located there, you make your way to the ruins of Nan Madol.

 

 Though you have trouble finding it you eventually arrive and set up camp at the large gate that stands before the ruined city. You make your way past the front gate and come upon a single pool of water that sits right behind a large, stone altar shortly after midnight on the same day. You stand over the pool and using a pocket knife you’ve had since a child, you cut your thumb on your right hand slightly, allowing the fresh blood to drip onto the octopus-like idol you have brought with you. Once the blood hits the figurine, you place the it in the center of the pool before you and take exactly three steps backwards. You become afraid then when the ground first starts to shake, then roar and crack open, however, over the sounds of what seem to be one thousand disembodied voices crying out in the song that ends the world, you know that if you can’t have your lover, well, at least no one else will.

 

      C: You cry horribly, for hours and hours at the impossible rate of which your love speeds away from your life, carried away by the masculine arms of their Somali captors. Admiral Nelson’s discount rum becomes your friend and close confidant in the days since the news broke that the submarine the terrorists were aboard has been lost at sea. You spend your remaining days painting pictures of your love with acrylic paints mixed with your own tears. Time heals all wounds, they say, but then they've never had their true love taken by sea pirates and sold into human slavery.

 

      D: You realize that a love lost is better than never having loved at all, and while you spend countless nights down the road waking up from dreams of your loved one that seem so real you’d swear they were still with you, your new lover, a wealthy underwear model and minor celebrity from Ireland only seems to help you survive the pain.

 

 

So' how'd you do?

 

Mostly A's: You may or may not be in love.

 

Mostly B's: You may or may not be in love.

 

Mostly C's: You may or may not be in love.