Life is filled with four different stages: childhood, teenage years, adulthood, and old age. Throughout those four stages, a person comes to know a myriad of words, experiences, and feelings. Fear, love and loss are a few of those words you learn that seem to have nothing in common, but as one ages very often they see how they intertwine.

Fear is something that is introduced to us at a very young age, most commonly as the irrational fear of the monster under the bed. I remember as a child my mother would always tell me "el coco" would come and get me if I did not fall asleep quickly. Then, as a person becomes older their fears become more plausible and scary. My biggest fear, like countless others, is failure. The failure of not doing well in school, the failure of not reaching my goals and the look of sadness my mother will have if I fail. Failure became my adulthood coco, only unlike the coco, I have seen what failure looks like. I have felt failure and because of that, I fear it so much. I know that gut wrenching, throat closing up, head pounding feeling and I would never want to experience it again. 

Love, on the other hand, shows us all the beautiful potential the universe has to offer. Love is a feeling that should be experienced by everyone, even at least once, and even if it does not end the way you would like it. The brief moments you feel love are worthwhile no matter the chances of heartbreak. It is like a drug you can take without you running the risk of their being jail time. To me there are two kinds of love, familial love and romantic love, I have been lucky enough to feel both. Familial love to me is a feeling that sets in when someone from your family, or someone you consider family, hugs you. In that one hug, you fill up with warmth, comfort, and the knowledge that no matter how much you have messed up in the past and continue to mess up in the future that person will always love you and be there for you. Romantic love, on the other hand, is the feeling you get when you look at your significant other in the eyes and all at once you: feel butterflies in your stomach even if you have been together for multiple years, an extreme sense of happiness sweeps over you, and although you acknowledge all their faults and annoying tendencies you know could not live a day without them. Then the only words you can utter to accurately represent all of this is "I love you." Although, there is one thing that most people do not say about love it comes with a boatload of fear. The fear that the love you hold dear will come to an end. It will feel like a great loss but at least, you got to experience love. 

Loss, it sounds like an empty word because it represents an empty feeling. It is a product of both love and fear. You can not feel loss unless you have loved and before loss, you feel the fear of it happening. I have experienced loss just as I have experienced fear and love. When I turned ten my grandfather died of a heart attack. The feeling of loss and sadness did not immediately set in. It actually happened a couple months, later on, my birthday, when I received a cake that my grandfather had paid for weeks before his death. As I looked down at the cake a mixture of rage and sadness filled my entire body. I was angry because I could not do anything to help my grandfather and sad because I knew I would never see his smiling face again. The feeling of loss can almost be compared to the feeling of fear only a hundred times worse.

Fear, love and loss are all feelings that at some point in everyone's life they will feel. Although some of the feelings are better than others you do not get to decide whether or not you get to feel them or when they just happen.