Until recently, I had been dating a wonderful girl for 11 months, 3 weeks, and 4 days (at least as far as I can figure).
Have you ever heard that love is a drug? That’s truer than I knew. It is both frustrating to realize how attached you can become to another person, and yet also liberating to share your life with someone who genuinely wants to take part in it. Not for any reason we can justify or merit we can earn, but just for us. It is simply because we are theirs. Love is blind in its reckless abandon.
There’s a great mystery in relationships, isn’t there? I don’t yet understand them. Why is it that we have deep, cavernous holes in our spirits? They are the kind of vacuums that ache for others, for community, in the chance hopes that our isolation will forever be sated. Finally. At rest.
It’s a scary proposition, to succumb to vulnerability. To surrender your will to another, to tend to their pain over your own, to think of their needs more highly than yours; these are not our nature. But because of that hole in our souls, it is our need, if not our nature. Why else, if the Creator had not wanted it so?
But want and desire are not enough. The timing is not always up to us. I’ll never comprehend why those who want companionship the most don’t find it. Still for others, sometimes love fails. Sometimes relationships whither.
Mine did.
And it stings. Like a gnarled skinned knee, and big salty globs of hyperventilation. But oddly… I don’t regret a second of it. Honestly. I loved, and I lost. And I am alive. And the morning comes, and with it the sun. And if I never walk hand-in-hand again, I will have the memory of having done that once, for 11 months, 3 weeks, and 4 days.
Deep inside of me, there is an alter ego that wants very much to be alone forever. That self has reasoned that I would be better off to never feel the pain of loss, that loneliness is a smaller price to pay for the lack of effort. It is hard for me to share my burdens in a community of fellow wanderers. Bear with me as I stumble back to my feet. Better yet, give me a hand, will you?
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