"Do you love me?" she asked, her desperation crackling through the phone.

"Huh?" It was too early to handle the situation comprehensively, I was still in the rubbing-the-crusty-white-stuff-out-of-your-eyes stage and trying to work out who I was speaking to.

"Really…I love you too!"

"What?" I leapt out of bed, red alerts flashing in my head. It was too late; she had already put the phone down with lumps of skin bunched at both sides of her stretched lips, her teeth glowing, her eyes staring blindly in rapture…

What did I do?

"Shit!" I screamed into the phone, jumping up and down like the psychotic prince from Roald Dahl's 'Cinderella' — "Off with her nut!" This was the fourth STRAIGHT chick to tell me that she loved me, and I had only spoken to her two days ago — for five minutes! Her desperation and lack of control annoyed me and, in attempt to rectify the inconvenience, I broke her heart.

"Ummm…sorry. I don't swing that way…and even if I gave it a shot, I don't think we'd look good together in public…"

It didn't make me feel any better about myself.  In fact, I spent the rest of the day hanging upside down from a malfunctioning rollercoaster, viewing my life in vertigo. The palpable intensity of blood rushing to my brain diverged all logic; so I let go of the safety bar and jumped. Freefalling tends to generate the slow-mode flashback effect in which imagery from your past passes before yours eyes in nostalgic self-obliteration…WHO have I become?

Alice pauses to ponder. "I'm sure I can't be Mabel, for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh! She knows such a very little! Besides, she's she, and I'm I, and — oh dear, how puzzling it all is!"

Relationships tend to have that effect on people! People dedicate their entirety to a word that no one truly understands — one's dreams, hobbies, goals are all replaced by the dreams, hobbies, and goals of an all-but-stranger that they love, disregarding all what-if situations as if nothing could ever go wrong. Things do. You wake up on a Monday morning, in the worn-out couch of an inarticulate shrink who empties out your purse and fills it with soggy tissues. Such despair can only exist in metaphors:

"The doctor said that I had been speeding. I told him that there weren't any red robots to make me stop. He replied that I was going too fast to see them!"

Don't get me wrong — I used to be one of those cloud niners who believed that relationships were about giving 100 percent in order to maintain them. After a year of gazing lovingly into his eyes and hearing the clichéd chime of wedding bells, I noticed the ring that he had forgotten to hide.

"What's that?" I asked stupidly.

"Oh, I'm married. Didn't I tell you?"

I froze, and was pummeled by the 365 days that had been stigmatized by his scent. His lips continued to move, but I only heard the agonizing cries of my breath trying to keep me alive. Life deteriorated. I became a walking Bridget Jones — the single, self-loathing drunk dissolving herself into the shields of He's Just Not That into You. As much as I tried, there was no life without him. He wafted in my mind until his name imprinted itself into my retina, and soon everything I saw became a reminder of him.

I was just as stupid as any other girl who had fallen for the well-rehearsed lines of Mr. All-but-Right. So I gave up on love only to be haunted by other women who, having made the same mistakes, have turned to loving other women as a substitute for their failed heterosexual relationships.

Sigh. Love is beyond me.

Tharuna Devchand