Love and Other Illnesses

I sit here in solitude, a by-product of the wreckage caused by one bad choice after another. I am ruminating on distance, loss, and what might have been. I am in love.

Funny thing about love, it will really hit you out of nowhere. A few months ago during a conversation with a friend, I was reminded that in spite of everything I should keep my heart open. I said yeah sure, my heart’s open. I admit to having been guarded for a while. I’d been in pain for so long how could I not be guarded. I understand when relationships don’t work, they just don’t work. Your fault, my fault, it’s not really relative. In the end, the issues were greater than the both of us so it didn’t work. You hurt, you recover, you go on to love again. But what happens when the person you loved and put everything into destroys you? You’ve been cheated on, deceived, abused, had your trust taken and twisted up and shot out of a cannon into the abyss of liars’ hell. The only way to get up in the morning and face the day without slapping the taste out of the next man to glance in your direction is to put a wall up around your heart. But the problem with that is when the wall goes up, you don’t just lock yourself in, you lock love out. The next time love comes looking for you you’re ready to neck roll and finger snap it away because you’re hurt and damned if you will let anyone else cause you the same pain or even anything closely resembling it. We never know how love is going to come. It could be the guy sitting across from you at church but you never see him because your other man, Hurt, is sitting by you. Maybe it was the man who smiled at you in the store but you looked at him like he was something you scraped off your shoe because good old Hurt told you that you didn’t need that man. All you needed was him because as long as you have Old Hurt you’ll never have New Hurt. Old Hurt is comfort and protection. Old Hurt doesn’t tell you that he’s blinding and deafening. You can’t see or hear love because Old Hurt has wrapped himself around you like a cheap wool blanket. Then one day you see a light. Old Hurt was slipping and left a crack. The more you see that light the more you want it. After a while you shed Old Hurt like last season’s Pradas and ever so slowly your heart starts to outgrow its fortress. You start to see and feel love all around you. Your favorite song on the radio, the shirt that hides your minor tummy imperfections, the shoes that make you feel like a diva, the friend that comforts you no matter what you’re going through or how many times you go through it. You’re loved and when you feel love you can give love. Admittedly I started finding love with the love of God. I never knew what it meant to truly let God love you until I felt like I had no love at all. *This doesn’t include my babies.* So when you let God into your heart, it has no choice but to open. When your heart opens, Old Hurt comes slinking back to remind you he’s still hanging around. The difference this time though, you don’t use Old Hurt as a means to protect you from New Hurt. This time you wrap your heart in Charmin so when New Hurt comes, it’s not nearly as difficult to deal with. New Hurt comes and goes, as it should, leaving not even a dent. Then one day you find someone has managed to slip past the layers and layers and layers of protection and found his way into your heart. The hell??? When did this happen and how did you get here?? It’s not the guy sitting across from you at church, it’s not Bottom of the Shoe Barry, it’s not even the nice guy from the library who loves books as much as you. No, it’s the one who’s held your hand as you went from one loser adventure to the next. He’s listened to you cuss and cry, watch you fall in and out of infatuation, been your knight on a white horse through it all. All of a sudden you’re excited when the phone rings and it’s him. You find yourself talking to him for hours and texting him all day. At first you say to yourself, of course I am, he’s my best friend. Then you say but wait, when did I start feeling jealous. Not that fake jealous but real honest to goodness jealousy because he’s on a date or has a girl over. What’s wrong with you?? Why is he all I think about and where did this yearning feeling come from? In a severe state of confusion and distress you call up Dr. Girlfriend and tell her your symptoms. Dr. Girlfriend my brain is swimming, my palms are sweaty, I feel warm and soft inside, my heart’s beating fast and slow at the same time, what’s wrong with me? Dr. Girlfriend shakes her head and makes the following declaration, you’re falling in love. That’ll be $50 and leave a check with my receptionist (daughter) on the way out. Well can I lay down until it passes? I can’t fall in love, not with this person. It’s impossible, it’s improbable, it could never work. As you go over every minute detail, you realize there’s no explanation, no defining moment. It just…happened. Dr. Girlfriend says it won’t pass because you don’t fall out of love. You fall out of intimacy, you fall out of trust, you fall out of respect, but you don’t fall out of love. She goes on to say you better inform him right away, as if he’s somehow in danger. Better to put it all out there and see where it can go. Oh the places we can go, the more you tell the more he’ll know. I don’t think so. Your buddy Old Hurt says you know exactly where this is going. Sad but true, we know how this story plays out. I don’t subscribe to the belief that it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I’m more of a it’s better to love in silence and keep my best friend then to tell him and have no best friend at all. He’s the one man I can always be myself with and I can tell anything to without judgment. I’ve never had that before. Why risk losing it because I couldn’t keep my heart in check? Marvin Gaye said a one way love is just a fantasy and right now I can live with that. I can live with best friend in reality and whatever else in my head. Ah yes, the obvious question, how do you know he doesn’t feel the same or similar? Come on girls, we know these things. When someone is that close to us, we know. We know if someone has even a passing interest in us. I don’t believe that just because I’m feeling this way, it needs to be explored and expanded. I think that’s where we turn the key to Pandora’s box. The expectation that because one person is falling the other person should adjust (or be willing to) the present relationship. Not so. If we could take this flour, egg, and sugar and make something of it then great. But for now I’m just content to feel something. To know I’m capable of feeling this way again about another person just may be enough. And my heart couldn’t have chosen a better man.