Love
When I love people, I love them forever. Even if we aren’t speaking or years have passed, it really doesn’t matter. They are with me. They are *in* me. I don’t want to talk about how “love” is the product of a chemical your body produces. I choose to ignore all that stuff. I like the drugs. I like that people’s chemicals produce those chemicals in me and it is the only thing in my life that I’ll turn my skeptic brain off for and just allow to be absolutely magical, because, well, why not.
My ex-boyfriend had some science book about love and he suggested that I read it, but I started to read it and I became horribly depressed. I admit it. Love is my crutch. Some people have Jesus, but I have love. I refuse to allow myself to think about what love really is. I like it being confusing. I like it tormenting me inside. I like it being a catalyst for creation and passion. Fuck ever knowing. I threw that damn book away.
You see, I grew up with a very specific notion of love and it changed drastically after the first time I actually experienced it. My version of love as a young child was a fairy tale. I was going to do the whole princess thing. I was going to find that magical person who kissed me and birds would sing. Butterflies would drape ribbons in my hair and everything and everyone would live happily ever after.
I’m convinced my mother doesn’t actually know much about this stuff, or she might have sat me down earlier and told me a thing or two. I went out into the world expecting to find that guy. He was going to be all that and more. Little did I know that my idealized version of love just didn’t really exist. Well, it did, but it didn’t fit into some mold like that and it might be unrequited.
The first time I fell in love, I thought I was sick. No joke. I thought I was coming down with the flu. I had dated this guy Josh for a few months. Everything was cool. He was a punk rock guy with some interesting politics, but he was all around good. We were at a friend’s house watching gangster and gangsta movies, my head was in his lap and he had his hand resting on me. I remember the feelings rushing through me. I thought I was going to puke. I couldn’t pay attention to the movie anymore and my focus was entirely on the core of my body which was radiating a warm yearning sensation. It burned. It tingled. I felt it in my pores. I felt it in my fingertips. I felt it straight to my eyelashes and on the tips of my ears. It was everywhere. Had to be the flu. I asked him to take me home, claiming I had a fever.
I went to bed that night curled in a ball and I just hugged myself, but I woke up discovering that the feeling was still there. I drank tea. I took showers. I went for walks, but that feeling never went away. Suddenly, I wondered where Josh was. I cared about what he was doing. This puzzled me. I never wondered where someone was before. I never cared about anything like this, but his well being was incredibly important all of a sudden and I absolutely could not wait to see him. I remember spending more time getting ready than normal. I found myself wearing “special” clothes to see him, but when I did, I felt dumb. Absolutely dumb. Sometimes I would just walk back to my house and avoid him and sit in the dark thinking about it all. I blamed him incorrectly for hijacking my brain and making me feel sick. I had no idea what was going on with me or my body, but after a few weeks I finally figured it out. We were laying in bed and he was talking about some ex-girlfriend of his and it hurt. I felt another emotion I had never felt for the first time. Jealousy. An emotion that can either work in your favor or strongly against it.
I decided I needed to get away from him. The longer I stayed with him, the more crazy emotions I felt. I was 15. I didn’t need this and he didn’t feel the same way. He wasn’t sick and it was clear that only I was inflicted with the illness. So, one afternoon at a punk rock concert in the park, I took him out into the woods and sat him down. I told him I didn’t want to be with him anymore, but I didn’t tell him why. A whole new flood of emotions came in that I had never felt.
Regret. Fear. Loss. Sorrow. Extreme Sadness. Depression.
Love.
Josh didn’t understand and I didn’t tell him for nearly 10 years what happened out there in the woods. We had a chance to date again. One night he came over and stayed at my place, but I made him sleep on the floor. At some point in the night, he asked me to come share my blanket with him and I knew what that meant and I said “hell no”. He responded, “so, you don’t ever want to go there again?” and I responded with a resolute “no”. Remember my snow globes? Well, I put him in one after that. I was afraid that if I ever actually allowed myself to be together with him, that perfect love I felt would go away forever or it would change into something else. I didn’t want that, so I trapped it in a perfect memory that I used for years that followed. Whenever I was sad or I felt an emotion I didn’t like, I thought back to that time and I allowed myself to feel that love. It is almost like I trained myself to feel it forever. Every new emotion that followed led back to him, which has been so pleasant, because I always think about him and he’s always with me. How wonderful is that? I still consider him one of my best friends after 15 years.
Five years or so ago he wrote something to me in an email that impacted me in a huge way. He said, “Cyan, sometimes you overwhelm me because you believe in me more than I believe in myself and you make me want to be the best I can be.” Well, it wasn’t those exact words, but it was something like that. To me, I was just being myself. I never thought about it in that way. I never thought about it as believing. I just thought about it as loving.
I feel lucky to have gone through all of this and worked it out at such an early age. Now I can love someone completely and I don’t have to be with them. I don’t have to be anywhere near them. I can be complete with it.
I use to worry that I’d run out of room for love, but it seems that I have an unending supply for it. Finding it is rare, but once I’ve found it, it never goes away and, well, I’ve grown to love that.
