I resent the thought that family is everything. That’s not to say I don’t love my family. I have a truly wonderful family. However to believe that one’s family is everything seems at best blissfully ignorant, and at worst short sighted and discriminatory. To love your family more than you love others doesn’t seem like the point to me. Likewise, loving others more than you love your family is just as ill-conceived. Ideally, impossibly, we love every person equally. This thought has grown more developed in my mind over the past five years while being alone. There have been countless opportunities for me to enter into relationships, yet in this solitude I have come to realize something important for myself. If I was to get married I would be incapable of loving others to the same standard that I would love my spouse and children. I would go so far as to say I wouldn’t be capable of loving even God to that same standard. I am obsessive. I make religion of small things. Even now when my mind wanders I find myself in sunflower fields praying liturgically to a sad god that doesn’t even know I exist. I should be crying out to Elohim but instead I whisper self flagellation. There are ghosts that haunt and hold power over me. They will be removed like the daggers I plunged into my body. It will be just as painful having them drawn out as well. However, if it enables me to die for everyone then I will endure even life.