So what did you do?

Essentially I stopped ignoring reality, as I had till that point utilized escapism to the limits of my imagination. Since it's cold Midwesterners are in a constant war with perception, the non-creative ones stay drunk as much as possible, others share collective fantasies called "Bones", or "House", or "Lie to Me", or "Dancing with the Stars", or "World of Warcraft", etc. and the rest have a variety of other methods at their disposal. Instead of these practices I read the holy books of the twenty-two major religions in human history, I expanded my base of friends by magnitudes and attempted to learn all that I could from my classmates (and verify that I wasn't afraid of women or suffering synecdoche), I made innumerable physical improvements, from the magnetic orientation and slope of the mattress I slept on to how many upside-down sit-ups I could perform in ten minutes, I began meditating and exercising super-emotional awareness, and always adapting tips from science studies and biographies I read that would discuss pitfalls or improvement techniques, while at the same not seeming interested in these things at all.

I was forced to create a Secret Love Philosophy to better understand what was going on within my mind. It totally informs the way I see the world and until now I haven't been able to talk with anyone about it much through the millions of interactions and causal contingencies my brain has run to model alternate explanations for 'why her?' 'what if we had never met?' 'can I say with certainty that no one else will ever come along and stir such emotions?' 'what if there were two identical versions of her?' 'what if I am mad and no one I know is real and she represents something inside myself?’ If I had to choose between saving her life and the life of twenty other people what would SHE want me to do?' Every day more questions like these, since I was too cautious to write down my explanations many likely will be lost to time as I internalized the solutions into my normal behavior patterns, but obviously every relevant political and social issue was examined in the light of trying to make the best possible world for her. As Tolstoy wrote "All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love....".