No matter the image I’ve tried to put off for years, deep down in the core of my being…love rules everything that I am. I know, it probably sounds like romantic bullshit, but do I give a fuck? No. That’s what love does to me. It makes me unreasonable and unrelenting. In love, and falling out of it. Love has been my best friend and my dearest enemy. I love the feeling of love so much that I will do anything for it. I will give up parts of myself for it. I will give up all of myself for it. I will lie to myself in the quest for it. But at the same time I will give you nothing of me. I will see the truth of darkness that sometimes exists in it and I will completely deny seeing it, like a scared witness who refuses to say they saw the murderer. I will turn my head and avert my heart away and eventually convince myself that I saw and felt nothing just to hang on to it. Some of these behaviors are reasonable. Most, are not.
I used to think love was beautiful and larger than life, but found it passive by nature. Existing in a world where we would go from deep intensity and get to a point of where passion faded and comfort thrived. That comfort is what I think kills most relationships. I hate that comfort that sucks every bit of passion out of it. Have you ever been in love? I have. (at least I thought so). But have you ever had true love? And trust me, there is a difference. I never knew there was such a thing until I met someone who made me feel it in every part of my being. Love is blinding and it is the greatest manipulator. Even when you see that it may destroy you with it’s temporary illusion of eternity, you can’t help but dive in. The scary part is that it’s your own ego and self worth, or lack thereof, that allows for the manipulation. But letting go and letting those walls down, no matter how hard, is part of the beauty of it. Letting go of fear is one of the most beautiful things you can do.
But then the darkness comes, and in the end, when you’re left in the ashes of love all you have is yourself, alone, as we all are in death. Sometimes acknowledging the end is enough to make it through to the awakening that being alone doesn’t mean certain death for eternity, but sometimes when you lose yourself deeply in that love, that it’s the deepest of wounds we can feel. So deep that when lost, we see no joy in the beauty around us that we once saw and lose hope from ever seeing it again. Bitter, sour, unforgiving and hopeless in anger. I feel the energy of lost love all around me, all the time. I’m intensely sensitive to it and it’s exhausting. When I’m walking down the street and get a glimpse of a persons eyes walking past me. I see it. The resentment lingering or the sadness weighing in or hurt scattering like wildfire. When we lose love, we don’t all go to the same places. Some of us heal in different ways and I believe one can heal from lost love, but the loss of true love is different. It stays with you forever. You can move on, sure. You can find happiness again, absolutely. But you will always have that wound and it will always somehow be visible. At least to those of us paying attention.
The difference between love and true love is connection. True love comes from chance. Time and place. A turn in the universe that took you to the exact place at the exact time in the exact moment in the exact frame of mind you were supposed to be. Am I full of shit? Maybe…if that’s what you want to believe, but I know the reality of something that would have people call me a mad man, and at one point I may have believed it myself, but the truth of it is undeniable. If you know the things I’ve conquered due to true love, you’d understand why I’m a believer in it. You’d understand my irrational actions as a whole. You can’t look for that shit on the internet. It just fucking happens.
I have been chasing love as long as I can remember. Even as a child I would romanticize the idea of finding that person, that lover, that I would be with forever. It would be so intense that the feelings in my heart would leave the cruel world and it’s shitbag opinions outside of my heart in a land of darkness never to come back and I would live in eternal happiness. The end. Now, I could end that extremely long and winded, childlike sentence and frame of mind with “what a crock of shit”, but I won’t. I won’t because I know it exists. That’s not to say that it will stay forever. That’s the problem. In fact, if there is a crock, it’s that it doesn’t. All that exists, dies. Especially beauty. I have had to come to terms with this and this revelation is not something that pleases me to say the least. Don’t call me a fucking pessimist, it’s just the truth. Just because you stay together forever doesn’t mean you’re still in love. Love flows. It’s an energy. And it may flow in and out of your life at any given time. It has no mercy and it has no boundaries.
What would I describe as true love? I can spout off all the small moments I felt love, but when I think of “true love”…I had it in a bizarre moment on the side of the road with a girl holding me so deeply in her arms in my most vulnerable state. In all my faults and brokenness and in her faults and insecurities, we found perfection in this connection. It was ONE of the most beautiful moments I have ever felt in my life. We laid in bed all weekend and stared and smiled at each other for hours before she boarded a plane back home in time for her deployment to nowhere. It was while I was lying there with her and inside me, and in what I like to call a soul, I felt the greatest connection to the universe I had ever felt through another person. Everything just seemed beautiful and alright with the world. Like no matter what happened in the world outside or inside of me, that because of this light between us, this connection, that I would be ok. That she would be ok. That the world was as it was for reasons and for the secrets of the universe and that I need not know what they were, but that this truth was real. I felt saved and not alone for the first time ever in my life. And it wasn’t solely because of her that I didn’t feel alone. That’s the weird part. It was just the love that connected me to her and her to me, and as a conduit was allowing me to feel connected to everything. I felt a light inside me as big as the sun spreading out. I imagine this would be like a high someone would strive to get from drugs, it was euphoric yet completely sobering. Sadly, it didn’t last. Not because I gave up on it, but because she gave up hope or perhaps love just gave up on us. Maybe mostly because she could never have me and I knew it. Now I sit here at times wondering, “will I ever have that again?” I have no idea, but I do know one thing, as sad as it can sometimes make me feel that I had it and I lost it, at least I found it. That stupid old saying is actually true.
I had to write this today because I realized this and it made me happy even as I pick up the pieces of everything I once loved and knew. I know that if I die never having fallen in love again, I can say that I will die happy in knowing that I had that moment, where from myself, through another beautiful human being, I felt the entire universe inside me.
