Febraury 14: V-Day

You know? Shakespeare receives an awful lot of credit for being the master of romantic love, but I have to respectfully disagree. He certainly knew a lot about it, there’s no doubt about that. But he’s not the only one. Romeo and Juliet was a masterpiece, there’s no denying it, but there’s been little said about other powerful authors who’ve told equally, if not more so, spellbinding love stories. Austen, Bronte, Tolkien, Alcott, just to name a few. You want a handbook to romantic love? The story tellers, artists, musicians and dreamers who’ve experienced it are the ones to hunt down. I believe with all of my heart that artists and writers and musicians were put on this earth to explain the most complicated chambers of our souls to those who don’t have the ability to express what’s on the inside. Everyone has a purpose. It may not seem functional or necessary to the practical, intellectual minded, but artists interpret a part of life that cannot be attained through textbook reasoning, and love is one of those parts of life that artists interpret for all of us, to connect us. And we need connection. We all have a purpose and everyone is connected by those purposes. While some are inventing the next big thing to hit the technology market, others are writing powerful novels about love; others are painting a portrait of the deepest parts of their soul, illustrating what can’t be put into words or technology; musicians are writing songs with powerful poetry that unravels what so many of us can’t figure out about our own selves; all of them giving us a way to see what’s on the inside.

Love is here for everyone whether or not it’s understood, received or declined, given or not given. Romantic love is something the very few chosen in the universe experience on a more divine, intense level than the rest of us, and who actually have the ability to attain it, keep it, and die with it. Austen must’ve known a thing or two on the matter to have written Pride and Prejudice… Bronte must’ve known a darker, more grounded edge to love to have written Jane Eyre…. Tolkien was in love with his wife until the very end, homage paid thrice over with his creation of Aragorn and Arwen… And Alcott seemed to be a woman who must’ve always known exactly what she wanted and wouldn’t take anything less than the real thing. What is the real thing? Austen fell in love with a bad boy who was too poor to take her hand in marriage. Bronte was the spitting image of her beloved Jane Eyre: did she too fall in love with a man like Mr. Rochester? Tolkien and his wife-to-be used to sit on a café balcony and throw sugar cubes into the hats of passersby below. Alcott never married and was quoted, “…because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls, and never once the least bit with any man…”

We all have our own story. Some of us want to share it in hopes there are others who can relate. We all want happy endings but we lose sight of what a real-life happy ending really means. There is no ending. Life and love move on until our graves.

Your first love falls through? It’ll come again. And if it doesn’t, there’s worse that could happen to you.

Fall in love with someone unattainable? Maybe your story ends like Jane’s, and maybe it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, you move on.

Find the love of your life? Someone who loves you back just as equally, just as thrillingly, just as true? Don’t mess it up. They’re your best friend and love for life, and you’re one of the very few chosen by the universe to have it. If you mess that up then you didn’t deserve to have it in the first place.

Haven’t found the real thing? What you’re looking for? There are worse things to be than single. Trust me.

To those who are in love, cheers to you on this frivolous celebration of romance: there are plenty of us who envy you. To those who are not in love? Allow me to recommend that you live vicariously through the artists who’ve told their stories either by novel, by music, by poem, sonnet, painting, or film. There’s nothing like being swept away by someone else’s drama, moved through someone else’s interpretation of what love did for them. For me, love taught me that my soul is capable of extraordinary things. Love taught me that happiness is in the eye of the beholder. Love taught me what I truly valued in other human beings, specifically the opposite sex. Love taught me that even though it can be dreadfully painful, through it all it is always worth it. Love reminds us that we have a soul, a functioning spirit. Without that, we’d be empty. We’d be nothing more than the shell of a demon, a monster, a sociopath surviving on instincts alone. Love completes us, no matter what sort of love it is. I? Am complete.

February 13

A friend of mine had been talking up her brother to me for over a period of several months before I finally got the sneaking suspicion she wanted to set me up with him. I’m not comfortable with set ups in general. There’s too much pressure. What if he’s ugly? What if he thinks I’m ugly? What if he’s really into me, but I’m not into him at all… Then what? How does that affect the friendship involved with the set up? Is my friend going to think I’m a complete snob for not giving him a chance? Or… what if I’m into him and he’s not into me? Awkward! There’s too much pressure. Not only that, but as you’ll remember, I came home from Florida fat, depressed, and completely broke. I wasn’t sure I had the confidence to be meeting anyone at all.

My friend’s birthday came around, and her brother was in town to celebrate it. She wanted me to come over to meet him. I wanted to come over regardless because it was her birthday, but I have to admit: I was definitely curious.

I almost left the house wearing something far too sexy for a family birthday bonfire party. I looked in the mirror and said to myself, “This is ridiculous, Jess. If he turns out to be something good, you want him to be attracted to who you are, not your boobs.” So I covered the girls with a T-shirt and sweatshirt. So, outfit: check. Hair: check. Eyebrows needed a tweak, though. So I got out the wax strips and got to work. Before I could help it I accidently covered more brow than I wanted to with one of the strips. When I yanked it off I split my right eyebrow completely in half. I now had three eyebrows. Swell. Forget the fifteen pounds I still had to loose, I was now a chunky, short haired, three browed frump. I colored in the missing hole with my eyeliner, and hoped it would do the trick. I left the house saying to myself, “It’s not like it matters anyway. With my luck he’s probably ugly and stupid.”

Yeah, so, I was wrong. He was definitely not ugly. He was definitely not stupid. He had a smart sense of humor, something that especially turns me on, and he was brilliantly nurturing with his family. I was taken aback by this. I had been expecting the worst. It’s easier to expect the worst: no disappointments. You would expect, too, that since he turned out to be something promising, I would’ve been feeling especially self-conscious (considering the state of my present physique). But the funny thing was, I didn’t. By the end of the night I was feeling comfortable around him, as if I had known him from a past life (a familiar feeling), regardless of my three brows, extra fifteen pounds, and frump wear. This was… new. I hadn’t felt this comfortable to be myself with a man I was attracted to since… well. You know.

My friend reported back to me later on what her brother had to say about our meeting of one another. Seeing on how he lived in a different state (a big reason having feelings would've been a waste of time anyway), we had talked about communicating online through a social network. I can’t remember the exact words my friend used, but they were to the effect of him not wanting to connect with me on a social network because he didn’t want to lead me on. Heartbroken? Hardly. My friend doesn’t even know this (well, she does now as she’s reading this…), but I was, to put it in layman’s terms: pissed. Who the hell does he think he is? Don Juan? So let me get this straight: He thinks that keeping in touch over a social network is going to lead me on? This was so unbelievably arrogant and condescending that my on switch was suddenly turned off. I was done being interested. If he wasn’t attracted to me, fine. No connection on his end? Fine. I’m a big girl and can deal with that. But to assume that I was going to fall head over heels for him through Facebook? I’m not a thirteen year old little girl with a crush, man. Conversation via Facebook posts is not going to get me hot and heavy for you. There’s this grown up thing where grown men and women can be ”just friends”…

Over a period of two years we saw each other now and again. I was no longer finding him arrogent(I got over that), and we passed a few words online anyway. A lot happened throughout those two years, but I’m not going to write out the entire story with all the drab on-and-on details because it would not only bore you, it would take up too much of our time. I want to get right down to the point, right down to that night and that fateful kiss…

I went to my friend’s parents’ house with her last winter for her brother’s birthday. Seeing her brother meant nothing more to me at this point than getting along with him as a friend, and it was nice. We were there for two nights, and it was on the second night that everything happened.

Everyone else had gone off to bed. He and I stayed up to watch a movie. It took us a long time to actually pick out the movie, and we never really got around to watching it all the way through because we ended up having a really deep conversation about spirituality and change and growth. That deep conversation converged into playfulness, jokes, making up stupid things, and trying to listen to the wolves that were supposedly howling outside. Throughout our conversations I was either finishing his sentences, or he was reading my unspoken thoughts, and we spent hours and hours of connecting to one another in a way that completely blindsided me. It was all so familiar. “I remember this,” I said to myself.

It was four in the morning. We popped in an SNL video. I was lying on the makeshift lounge he had made for me, and as we were watching the television I began to think about what this night had consequently dug up from my past. I began to think about that fateful Thanksgiving so many years ago. I thought about sitting in my car with him in when I drove him to his parked car. I thought about our goodbye and the moment that I would regret for years to come. I thought about how I had gone for the cheek instead of the mouth. So, I made a decision: I was going to go for the mouth this time.

I got up from that make-shift lounge, my decision made, and told him I was going to go to bed. He was stretched out on the couch, so I stood over him, looked down into his face, said good night, and bent down and kissed him. He kissed back for a second, but as I recall now there was reluctance thereafter. I was too caught up in the moment to realize this until after the fact, but I was way beyond a point in my life of trying to be cautious. I had already done the cautious thing in my past, and it bit me in the ass. I spent six plus years paying for that mistake, and trying to make up for it with meaningless men. This, here, now, was exactly what I wanted, and this man wasn’t meaningless to me (go figure), so I went for it.

I crawled up on to the couch with him, kissed him again, and our heads touched for one, split tender moment before I realized that immediately after, it was gone. Friends, it is.

I went to bed that night with extremely conflicting emotions. I was realizing that my friend-only feelings were overcome by the familiarity of an old love. I was doing it all over again. This was soul wrenching and confusing for several days after the fact. I was trying to process my motive, the real reason I kissed him, and did I just ruin a potentially great friendship because of it…

The reality was that it taught me something extremely important: that it is definitely possible to fall in love again. It is definitely possible to connect with more than one man in my lifetime. It is definitely possible to take a chance, and thereafter feel the freedom of no regret. I went for the mouth this time. Now I know. And now I can go on without ever looking back.

February 12

The Others:

Man#7,8,9 et cetera were nothing more than improbable contenders I tried to connect with at local bars. One, was actually on Valentine’s. Trying to tell myself not to feel sorry for myself, I talked myself into going out. I did this often. For some reason I could make myself go out to the bars, alone, rather than getting myself connected with the nanny agency. I think I was afraid of not being able to connect with other nannies. I was, am, a unique breed. The bar seen seemed to be where any ol’ riff raff would fit in.

But I ended up doing a lot of stupid things in my quest to meet someone. For one, I had a habit of drinking more than I should have. It cooled the nerves, and there were times I just couldn’t stop. This naturally clouded a lot of judgment. My list of prospects were made up of one, long haired musician fifteen years older than me, one twenty year old who after one night of serious drinking wanted to put a ring on my finger (after sobering up, the reality of my zero attraction to him was alarming), one old chum from high school that had always been a good friend but suddenly seemed like someone to plug in to that void, and one stranger in a café that I never had the courage to talk to. I was drowning in the reality that there could be nobody else to complete me the way he had. I tried. I really, really tried.

After Philly I moved back home to Minnesota after my roommate got married. A year later, I moved back to Florida. Florida failed me. I gained more than twenty pounds this time, and when I had finally admitted defeat I moved back to Minnesota yet again. I had my hair cut again, too, in my haste to make change. I was back to square one with my self-esteem. Zero, if you want to get technical.

But just when I thought I couldn’t feel any more hopeless about getting over you know who, I met a new contender. Even though only a friendship came out of it, this was the first time in ten years that I began to believe in the idea of falling in love again.

February 11

My first Thanksgiving living in Philly, I had come home to Minnesota for the holiday.

Completely unexpected, he called the house. (He, him, you know who). He called to see if my brother was home for the holidays. My father, who had answered the phone, told him no but that I had come home and would he like to talk to me. My father handed me the phone, told me who it was, and everything in my stomach dropped to the pit of my bowels. I had come to a point, finally, where I was convinced that I was over him, but when that phone was handed to me I was overcome with….well.

We met up at The Mall of America to have a few drinks and catch up. I was expecting his girlfriend to come too, but he came alone. This wasn’t the first time I had seen him since I had moved away. I had come home for one of my brother’s weddings, and that was the first time I had seen him in years. This particular Thanksgiving is worth telling, however, because it explains one of the many reasons I hate the holiday and get physically ill through it year after year. Again, spare me your judgments, Reader. I know perfectly well how weak I am. Understand that this is one of the reasons I hate Thanksgiving, not the only.

We met up at a bar on the fourth floor of the mall. For hours we talked, laughed, played, drank, walked the mall, wheeled each other around in a wheel chair we found by the bathrooms, held hands, caused a ruckus, made people stare, and found each other between this huge, unspoken understanding of regret on each of our parts. Our goodbye was the most bittersweet awaking I’ve ever experienced in my entire life. We hugged. I wanted so badly to kiss him, but instead went for the cheek. “He has a girlfriend,” I told myself. “You can’t tell him you love him.” He got out of my car in the parking garage, and I was never the same again. I should’ve told him, then. That was the moment. That was when I should’ve told him I loved him. That was the defining moment predicting our entire future of regret.

The following Thanksgiving, or rather the weekend before it, I drove across Pennsylvania to visit my brother. Well, two brothers actually. The youngest came to live in Pittsburgh too… and he had a roommate. He was a creative, funny, witty, cute roommate who little did he know became victim Man #6.

Long story short, #6 and I went out for dinner while my brothers were at work. We went back to his apartment only to end up face locked and on the floor. Having enjoyed his company profusely, and feeling extremely freed by not having to think about you know who, and ….well. Let’s just say this was a defining moment of proof that loneliness and grief can turn you into someone you never expected to spawn into existence.

My infatuation with him was intense, and I made an extremely desperate move. I asked him, mid-make-out, when he was going to move to Philly. At first I thought I was being recklessly charming and flirty, but the look on his face was, “Oh shit…”. And then my insides were saying, “Oh shit…” So I told myself to, “just keep kissing….go for the neck or something….” But the damage was done. I had made an ass out of myself.

Not long after this, the jiggling of the lock on the door was heard, and the two of us sprung up from our positions and threw ourselves onto the couch attempting to look like we were innocently watching television. My brothers walked in, and that was that.

February 10

Humiliation happens to everyone, right? It happens more frequently and more severely to the lonely. Trust me.

I was a nanny when I lived in Norristown, and even though the agency I went through had a nanny connection program, I was too shy and going through too deep of a depression to have the energy to partake in something that potentially could’ve rescued me from a lot of grief. I had no friends. I had my roommate and her boyfriend to hang out with, but being their third wheel was the equivalency of having the regret of who I left behind slap me in the face over and over and over and over again. I loved their company, don’t get me wrong, but it was painful. I know how self-centered that sounds, and I really tried to not allow my own self-pity to interfere with my friendship, but it did. However, the self-loathing and pity eventually got to me, and drove me to pep talk myself into figuring out how to socialize and put myself out there. This, is where I always fail. My anxiety keeps me from gracefulness, and I’m unable to cope with my awkwardness. And honestly, Reader? I just really, really hate small talk and the obligation of trying to be “normal”. I can’t communicate on a normal level. I sort of have a level all to myself…

So. One night while barbequing for myself, experimenting with ingredients (like Malibu rum), the boys upstairs had come out onto their porch and began raving about the smell rising up through the slats of their patio. Feeling excited to be getting attention for something I was doing well (cooking), I engaged. They, not me, insisted that I bring them what I was cooking because it smelled so amazing. They invited me up. So. I cooked everything, was too excited to eat for myself, wrapped up the chicken and knocked on their door. They welcomed me in, and I was feeling proud of myself for talking down my anxiety and actually going for it (it, being social interaction with my own species). I came in, said my hellos, put the chicken on the counter and opened it up and told them to dig in. They all groaned with, “Aw, we just ate. So sorry. ‘Can’t eat it right now.”
I didn’t know how to respond to this. I can be fragile when it comes to putting myself out there, so this shook me up. (Pathetic is a word I use very often for a reason.) I misunderstood, apparently, when they said to bring up the food. Why did they just eat if they knew I was bringing food? I felt like the size of a pea. I wanted to run for that hole… But I hung tough, and shook it off. This was when I smoked all of racist’s artsy wannabe’s cigarettes while I sat there like an idiot and watched them play poker.

It was some time after this that we went to that bar together. I was figuring by this time I was becoming chmmy with them, so I was feeling more confident and wanted and socialized. They ended up eating my Malibu chicken on a later day and raved about it, another ego booster that made me feel welcomed. So, I had thought to myself, why not continue to bond with food? Being Sicilian, food is how we bond, so what the hell… Why not? I made up a whole dish of chicken catatora, my most perfected recipe, stuck it in the fridge and decided to be creative about how I was going to offer it to them. I had these excellent postcards with Wonder Woman comics on the fronts, so I took one that was especially funny (or so, I thought), and wrote on the back of it something to the effect of: “I have a chicken casserole for you guys. Come and knock if you want it! From: the goddess below”. I stuck it in their mail slot, and waited.
Nothing, for two days. I passed them on the sidewalk and nothing more was said than an awkward, “hey”. I was feeling the size of a pea again, but told myself, “Don’t be made out of glass. Get over it.”
Four days passed. The chicken had to get eaten soon, and it was way too much for me to eat it by myself. So late one Saturday night I opened the fridge, stared at my tin foiled casserole dish and said to myself, “Get some courage. Just knock on the door and give it to them.” So, I did.
I knocked. I could hear them talking and laughing. Music was playing? No. Maybe they couldn’t hear my knock…. I knocked again. Nothing. I stood there with my stupid casserole dish weighing on my arm, and knocked again. I was afraid to turn away and afraid to stand there all at the same time. I had this excruciating foreboding, all of my senses telling me, “They ignored you after the postcard…they’re ignoring you now…they want you to leave them alone….you’re going to make an idiot of yourself….”

The door finally opened, and there was short blonde meat head acting (a really bad actor) surprised to see me (I could tell they were ignoring my knocks). In a very awkward small voice I explained that I had made a chicken catatora for them and wanted to bring it over. He acted (again, bad acting) surprised by this as well. He then very reluctantly asked me up. I didn’t want to go up. I could already feel the potent rejection. Maybe it was my own insecurities and paranoia (a grand possibility), but I was certain that at this point I was no longer wanted in their little boy club. Maybe they realized I wasn’t the party girl who puts out like they were hoping. Either way, I felt stupid going up into the apartment, but I did.

It was awkward. I was feeling intrusive, my worst handicap in all of my relationships, casual or not. I am petrified of being in people’s way. I am petrified of being unwanted. I lasted maybe an hour of the awkwardness when meat-head asked me if I wanted to shower with him. I had the sneaking suspicion he was purposely trying to offend me to get me to leave. Either way, even if he wasn’t, it was an asshole of a move. I took the hint.

I came to the conclusion later on that I was being played. My extremely beautiful and socially graceful roommate often came up in their conversations, asking me how serious her boyfriend was. Defending their relationship profusely, I seemed to have let the boys down. They had helped her carry in her groceries, once, and that alone didn’t faze me until the day came when I came back from a huge grocery/errand run with twenty bags of stuff. While they played whiffle ball in the courtyard, I made trip after trip back and forth from my Jeep to the apartment with not any three of them offering to help. Instead they jibed and teased about how many bags I had. I had to walk past them, red in the face, for a total of twelve trips on the sidewalk, forcing them to pause their pitch every time I walked past the back of the batter. Humiliation.

I failed. I’m not even sure if I read all their signals right, but even if I didn’t, it only goes to show how difficult it is for me to figure out how to fit myself in without making an ass of myself. Were they worth it? Hell no. I know that. Paranoid or not, there were other signs, signals; snide, blatant remarks; moments of rudeness that I’m not going to go on and on about to bore you with that supports the fact that I was trying way too hard to fit myself in to a group of assholes just so I could feel like I belonged to any group at all.

Months went by. A year, maybe. I had barely seen the boys within that time when before I knew it they were packing up and moving out. Within that time, I had successfully been putting myself back together. I had lost those twenty pounds, and my hair was growing in cute. I had finally got back on my feet financially, and I was able to afford a nice new wardrobe that boosted my confidence significantly. I was dressed up on this particular day, karma paying me a little somethin’ somethin’, wearing a top I felt pretty good in when I heard a knock on my door. I opened it to find those two blondies telling me they were here to say good-bye. Tall blonde guy that I used to gawk at? Looked me up and down, and I swear on all that is sacred to me I could read a blush and a small flicker of desire on his face. Meat head was offering his good-byes, and tall blonde guy bent down to hug me goodbye. I got to hug tall blonde guy. Or rather, he got to hug me. I was pretty sure they were looking to say goodbye to my roommate more than me, but the fact that I was all they had to see them off was a little rewarding. Adios, First Blonde Crush Ever! I think his name was Doug.

February 7, 8 and...9

Okay. So I’m cheating. I’m combining three days together because I just couldn’t get around to doing day seven or eight. The most excellent thing about being an artist is that you get to break rules, and for some crazy reason people find it charming. It’s liberating because I’m not much of a rule follower.
So, I’ll leave off where I left you:
Man #5:
Ah. The man upstairs. A set of three twenty something bachelors moved in to the apartment above us: two blondes and a brunette. I can’t remember exactly how we all ended up being introduced... I know it wasn’t due to any social graces of my own (ha! What social graces?), but my roommate and I became acquainted with them. Little blonde guy was extremely intense: total meat head, obnoxious, and almost as desperate as I was. The brunette was the oddball, dope-smoker, artsy wannabe who was attracted to me. This was disappointing because he was racist and I had no interest because of it. But tall blonde guy… I’d never, ever, ever been attracted to the preppy, pretty boy blonde type. In fact, blondes alone are definitely not my sort of game. But there was something about this blonde that made me feel like my knees stopped existing and all of my confidence (what little I had to hang on to) went whipping out of sight in the wind of his grand, fantasy entrance, a golden halo nearly beaming above his golden head. Every time I saw him walk by our apartment window, heading to the laundry room, I’d gawk. Really, really gawk.
I seemed to have developed this pattern in wanting unattainable men. I could pine from afar, fantasize about the what-if’s, and then feel sorry for myself knowing that it could never be. But the truth of it is if Tall Blonde had ever actually asked me out, I would’ve run into the nearest rabbit hole and shat my pants. He was so far out of my league, so far from someone who would’ve been compatible with me, so far from someone who could’ve possibly been attracted to me. I didn’t see him with a girl like me. No way. I pictured him being with some leggy blonde in scarves and tall black boots, a girl who lived a clean living, knew a lot about pop culture, shoes, and hand bags, had a tinkling sexy laugh, and drove a red convertible. I was the frumpy, artsy brunette that smoked, knew a lot about movies and Harry Potter, and drove a Jeep with a duct taped, safety-pinned window.
I don’t know what came over me, but I was pathetically infatuated with the man upstairs. I hang out with the boys on a couple of occasions, smoking all of the racists’ brunette’s cigarettes in a poker game that I sat and watched them play, going to the bar with the blondes one night and having my ass grabbed by a four hundred pound man who claimed to be a football player (little blonde guy had actually done a gentleman act of saving me from that awful experience), and then…. The humiliation. The ultimate humiliation.

February 6

Norristown is about thirty miles outside of Philadelphia. I usually just tell people I lived in Philly because it’s obviously more identifiable, but the truth of it is: I lived in Norristown. I liked Norristown. It was quaint, close to the King of Prussia Mall, and only an hour away from one of the oldest cities in the country.

My identity crisis followed me through an early March snow storm, over slushed covered stretches of highway, through a splattering of miles and miles of road salt that turned my blue Jeep Wrangler completely white. It’s a five hour drive from Pittsburgh t Norristown. I had been hoping the move would do me good, a chance to start over. Craving re-do’s is perfectly normal, right? Fresh slates and all that… Starting new is always a means of growth in one’s being, but change is hard. Change means adaptation, and adaptation can mean compromising choices and the slow, painful peeling away of an old self. This molting process for me seemed to have had an extraordinarily slow tempo; no rush, no pause, just unbearably slow and painful.

Getting to work straight away, I worked hard to lose that weight I had gained, and I patiently waited through extremely awkward phases of my hair growing out. But the work seemed to be futile because even though I was feeling better about myself, I was lonelier and more desperate to fill that void than ever. On the upside of this, my three years in Norristown were some of the most creatively productive years of my life. Grand depression and loneliness has a bittersweet value of producing great art.

And I arted the crap out of myself.

I also did a lot of very, very stupid things, starting with Man #5…

February 5

Re-reading my last post on my blog site, I came to a disconcerting reality. Actually, I came to a few. The first one being that it was horribly written. I don’t like the column format that displays on my blog. The flow and rhythm of what I write reads entirely different in the broader format of Word. I’m not making excuses for my shitty writing, don’t get me wrong. I’m just, nettled by this. The second disconcerting reality is the fact that by disclosing so many personal things about my life and opinions has consequently given me the feeling that I’ve taken off all of my clothes, and I can now feel the eyes of everyone looking at me, scrutinizing my patheticness, viewing all of the dimply areas of my nakedness that I try so hard to keep secret. There’s an overwhelming feeling of, “Oooooh, crap. You’ve really done it now.” And that’s just it. I really have done it, and now I have to finish it with as much grace and dignity as I can afford. However? This is me. This is my pattern. I have a tendency to jump in with two feet, recklessly, often into a pool of gaping gators that I didn’t know were there until it was too late. I either jump back out, back-pedal to a comfort zone, or? I swim across in hopes the other side of the pool is worth reaching. I’m already naked, a quarter of the way through the gator pool, so I might as well keep moving forward to the other side. I’m hoping to redeem myself in this post, making up for the prior. I’m also going to try to lighten things up a bit, so try not to take this next post too seriously. I’m about to do some serious self-deprecation, sharing of some intensely embarrassing and revealing things all in hopes to connect with an audience that is hopefully relating, not judging.

So, because I have to keep certain people (men) anonymous, I’m going to refer to them as numbers. I don’t mean to be degrading. I’m trying to be considerate. Continuing from what I wrote in my last post, I’m now going to go through the list of men I pined for, the few I put the moves on, and the couple that I crossed humiliating lines to express my free-flight of make-fun-of-myself desperate attempts to do more than just “make a pass”. This makes me sound a little trashy, so let’s just get right to it so you can see how tame and sort of funny all of this really, really was:

Man #1: ‘Friend of someone who was close to me; made me laugh; attracted to when drunk; often slept on his couch when the bourbon was passed around; and couldn’t have been more wrong for me in so many lights. The alcohol played a large factor in my chum girly girl fantasies of him. Sober, awkwardness was on the forefront. He made me laugh. I liked that. He was someone close to someone who was close to me, and that was a comfort zone I clung to. Time line of pining? Let’s see….I’d have to count all the times we drank together….. Close the door on this one!

Man #2: Ah. Man number two. Let’s see… I saw him for maybe a total of three hours at a friend’s wedding. I hadn’t seen him since I was twelve and ugly and awkward, and here I was twenty two years old and back into an ugly, awkward phase again (remember? The bad haircut and the twenty pounds?). I was petrified. And it really didn’t help that I was physically attracted to him. Feeling like a petrified infant rabbit about to be eaten by a wolf, I was searching the entire building we were in for the nearest exit, the closest excuse to get away, unable to look at him when he was trying to make re-connecting, catch-up small talk with me. He caught on quick, but misinterpreted my eye language. Heart pounding, I was looking for my brother, or someone, anyone, who could come up and take over the conversation, but to no avail. He thought I was being a snob. He mumbled sarcastically, “Yeah. Nice to talk to you too. Haven’t seen you in years. See ya later.” And right when I was about to ball up the courage to ask him something, he rolled his eyes and took off.

Embarrassment is an understatement. The need to resolve the issue, another understatement. The cruel irony of it was that I had suddenly found myself ridiculously attracted to him. This, was madness. In the bad way. During the wedding reception and the after party I was able to redeem myself slightly. A few bottles of Corona helped this along… I was able to make eye contact now, and keep up a semi-conversation. We hugged goodbye when it was over, and I found myself unable to stop thinking of how much he reminded me of the man I left back in Minnesota. This? Yeah. I was convinced by this point that I had a serious problem. I wanted to plug this new man into my life so badly that my fantasies retreated to all sorts of insane scenarios of happily-ever-afters. ‘Another pathetic consequence of loss and loneliness. Time line of pining? A month, tops.

Man #3: I can’t write about him, so you’re just going to have to wonder.

Man #4: Here’s the story I know you’re all waiting for, the one I’ve been avoiding but feel like I have to share for not only therapeutic reasons, but because I promised it to my readers. Remember that subtle mention of the dude at the club? I had never been to a club in my life. I had never done a lot of things in my life, let’s just say, up until Pittsburgh. This event, this story I'm about to share, was slightly pivotal for me because I was consistently, obnoxiously, surrounded by couples left and right, and when you’re missing someone you thought you were supposed to be with, this can play a toll on you, emphasizing loneliness. But this night? It was a girls’ night out. I don’t think I had ever even had a girls’ night out before this particular night. I can’t even remember exactly how it happened, but I ended up hitting the town with two women that my brother worked with, and he was supposed to meet up with us later. But he never came. And I was left to my own devices… er… vices.

I love to dance. 'Understatement number three. I really, really, really love to dance. But when I say I love to dance, I don’t mean I love to gyrate on the dance floor and get felt up by random guys. I mean: I love to let my body move to music because it frees something inside of me that otherwise dormant is always knocking on its walls wanting to be let out. However, in a club? Club dancing is pretty much a watering hole for people who want to do nothing more than find someone to mate with. Naïve, twenty two years old, sheltered and brought up to never break rules lest you burn in the fiery pits of hell, something sort of snapped inside of me. Well, that and a lot of booze were involved. I’ll tell you now, Reader, that this was not one of my shining moments, and if there is anything in my life that I could say was the most embarrassing moment, this would be it. Well, with the exception of the Philly stories soon to come (stay tuned, I guess….).

Now, here I was after a few cocktails, really enjoying myself on the dance floor when some guy came up out of nowhere and started dancing with me. And when I say out of nowhere, I mean it. I can remember it exactly, as if he was gunning for me. He parted the waves with his flailing arms and was upon me like an extremely horny warthog. Lucky for him, he was cute. So, I kept dancing. This was new to me. I was feeling rather grown up and rebellious, and without a brother (I have three) to keep the boys away, I found myself getting a little handsy with my contender. Before I knew it we were lip-locked and doing things that should only be done in private, even in a dance club. Allow me to reiterate, Folks: ‘not a shining moment for me. It gets worse.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to see the two women I came with (who were graciously non-judgmental), and they wanted to introduce me to someone: one of my brother’s clients. This in and of itself was only slightly embarrassing. Well, more than slightly. Coming-to, peeling myself off of the stranger I was molesting, and trying to appear as sober as possible, I said hi to the woman who knew my brother. I remember a few words were exchanged, but that was it. The real embarrassment comes later in the story.

I’m extremely grateful to have been in good hands in terms of my company (not the stranger). My brother’s co-workers took good care of me. I had sort of gone off of the deep end, not knowing how to compose myself with a whole lot of dignity. I had been caged in loneliness, grief, a loss of faith, enduring a serious identity crisis, and then added a whole lot of free drinks. This night of letting loose was proof that I had really lost all of my good sense altogether. I danced with this stranger all night, had him write his number on a napkin (how many cliches are we on, now?), and almost went home with him if my company hadn’t insisted I come home with them instead.

Monday came along and my brother told me about how his client mentioned she had seen me at the club. My eyes went a little wide as he began to tell me this with a smirk on his face. My eyes were wide for good reason. Sober now, I remembered exactly what I was doing when I was tapped on the shoulder, and I remembered more than I wanted to… I remembered wiping the spit off of my mouth when I had to re-compose myself… I remember the look of shock on her face when I was introduced to her. My brother re-tells what she told him, which was this: before she knew who I was, she had seen me lip-locked and handsy on the dance floor and had thought to herself, “Geez! Get a room!” Hence the look of shock on her face when we were introduced. I don’t think my face has ever turned a brighter shade of red in my entire life. My brother thought it was funny. I, however, wanted to crawl into a hole.

Not long after this pivotal event did I move to Norristown, Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia. My adventures of embarrassment failed to cease, and if I’m not mistaken with my own judgment, worsened.

February 4

Pittsburgh was a party phase, to be blunt. I’m not saying I whipped off my top at Dave Matthews concerts, but I sort of came close to that. It was an experimental time for me. To paint a picture for you, Reader, I had been a holier than thou goody-goody in my high school days. I think I uttered a swear word a total of five times in my entire teenage career, and the only time I said the F-word was when he (the guy I fell in love with) was in a heated debate with me and used it in something he said to me. I had turned around what he said with a passionately angry point by repeating what he had said, coincidently using the F-word. My room of friends gasped, and a group of very happy fingers were pointing at me crowing, “You just said the F-word! I can’t believe you just said the F-word!” I did it so accidently that I denied it profusely for a good ten minutes before I realized that I was outnumbered by at least four witnesses who all heard the same thing come out of my mouth. That, Reader, is how much of a goody-goody I was. Picture that, and then see me five years later getting toasted in a bachelor pad in a Pittsburgh ghetto, and the contrast is a little alarming.

It was the religion factor that kept me separated from him. Religion? I had always hated the word “religion”, Reader. I really did. I never considered myself “religious”. I considered myself a “Christian”. But now even that word has lost so much of its original meaning. You can be a drug dealing racist and call yourself a Christian just because you “believe in God”. For me, in high school, my faith was my lifestyle. I was tormented because according to the doctrine that was taught to me, no two people should be “unequally yoked”. For those who aren’t familiar with scripture, this was interpreted to me as: Christians should not date or marry non-Christians. This, can I just say, is just as asinine as saying a woman can’t fall in love with a woman or a man can’t fall in love with a man. This is where my bitterness began to wedge itself in. Unequally yoked? I had never felt more equally yoked to anyone than I did with him. Outside what the church had taught me, and going against all doctrines, I truly felt in my heart that the God I worshiped had made him for me, that He wanted me to be with him. But I was so afraid of breaking the rules and so scared of the consequences that I never fully pursued what I should have. Regret is an awful taste that never leaves the tongue, I tell you. I began to feel bitter and angry and empathetic for all those who wanted to liberally love who they loved without having a church tell them that it was a sin to. Explain to me how acting upon love is sinful, will you? I’m pretty sure Satan doesn’t temp us to love. So. This drew me from “Christianity” pretty swiftly (amongst other things irrelevant).

There were times, too, when I was convinced I was getting the okay from God. Scripture would pop up in my devotions in my favor. I had heard a voice in my head out of nowhere telling me to, “Love him”. I knew exactly who “him” was, no questions asked. I was also having dreams that were guiding me into the direction that all of this was my fate, my destiny. The dreams were the hardest to ignore. They were very realistic, quite unlike a fantasy, and there was always the undeniable feeling of being touched or spoken to by God when I would wake up shaking in my sheets. And then I would cry, unable to understand what was happening to me. I pushed aside the shady, spiritual evidence and viewed all these so-called signs as misunderstandings. “You’re only seeing what you want to see,” I would pep talk to myself. I was convinced that I was simply blinded by hormones, confusion, a comfort zone I craved, and an incredibly misguided infatuation. Emotions are not reliable, and I’m over aware that I’m an intensely emotional person (it goes along with that temperamental artist personality of mine-cliché number two), and being consciously aware of my instability and frequent mood changes, I was in utter denial. I re-told myself a hundred times that I needed to get the hell over it, and there was no way that God would really give the okay for something I had been taught my whole life was wrong.

Pittsburgh? I sort of snapped.

My goody-goodness wasn’t going to cost me love again. I was apparently going to make sure of that. So, I sort of went on a bit of a sin binge. Well, pretty sinful for me anyhow. I’m not about to confess throwing myself into random men’s arms and letting them have their way with me. No. Ha! That’s actually comical if you knew me at all… No. It was more like boozing every weekend, finding my voice in the world of swear words, funny looking pipes, Camel Lights, and not going to church. It was crying every time I tried to pray, and then embracing the idea that everything I had been taught growing up was, indeed, wrong.

See? My life just becomes more and more cliché the more I share it: Good little church girl goes bad. Good grief.

My rebellion with men? Hmm. I don’t know if that’s what you want to call it: a rebellion. This makes me sound like a sixteen year old trying to show up her parents by sneaking out of her bedroom at night with a boy waiting on the corner of 10th and Pine. It wasn’t a rebellion. It was needing to fix how I felt with a substitute. The unexpected outcome of this was that I didn’t date; I didn’t go after anything I couldn’t have (well, not yet at least); I didn’t have any one night stands; I barely kissed anyone… (with the exception of that one dude in that one club – a story for tomorrow). No. I pined. I was confused. I found fellowship and belonging in the most unlikely of contenders, and I pined from afar. I made up fantasies about these men who in all reality would have never made a descent match whatsoever, but I wanted so very badly to move on from how I felt. The fantasies supplied a sort of false hope that seemed to get me through it. I wanted so desperately not to think of myself as someone who was so weak, so pathetic, to have become so intensely filled with sap and infatuation with someone I had only thought that I loved. It couldn’t be love. I truly believed that if I found someone else, I’d realize that everything I felt was nothing more than a silly delusion, a madness that needed a cure. This? Backfired big time. Using delusions to rid yourself of what really ends up being a reality after all, isn’t the right way to go. In other words: the love was a reality that I thought was a delusion, and I tried to get rid of the delusion with the reality of other men. But the reality of other men, as it turned out, was the delusion. Make sense yet? My head hurts too.

February3

When you lose things to an unwanted wind of change that you have absolutely no control over, the grief can turn you into someone you never thought would spawn into existence. Losing my home, my friends, family, my life in the move to Minnesota was already profound in and of itself. But losing a romantic lover seems to have had the most pathetic consequences of all. I’m not sure it does for everyone, but it sure as hell did for me.

After my adventure in Florida (where I moved to at age twenty one), I hit the road to go live with my brother in Pittsburgh. I loved Pittsburgh. Not romantically of course (har har), but I definitely fell in love with it, embraced it as a substitute for home. I don’t doubt that this falling had a lot to do with the fact that I was living with family, living with someone who is already a part of me, a connection to everything I know about my truest identity. My brother has always been my living, personal hero, and having new adventures in a new city with him was undeniably a memorable year in my life. However, I was struggling, even still, even after all the time that had passed, with who and what I left back in Minnesota. I wanted to shake that “who” from my life, from my heart, but there was no doing it.

I went through a dark depression after half way through my one year of Pittsburgh, packing on twenty pounds, accidentally cutting my horrifically already short hair into an embarrassing, badly chopped up bob, and feeling more ugly and undesirable than I think I may have ever felt in my entire history of hating my outward appearance. Pathetic. Hating myself profusely, I could barely conceive the idea of drawing any attention sexually. And let’s face it, an initial sexual attraction is often the only way to draw in the potential of falling in love. ‘Hence the trickiness of it all.

On the other hand (now that I’ve given it a second thought), an initial sexual attraction is not necessarily the only gateway into love. Some people grow connected over time. Some people have to dig past those outer layers before they recognize that someone is, indeed, sexy to them. Some people despise each other before they fall in love. Some people have the oddest forms of foreplay that can go on for years before either of them even realizes that it’s been foreplay all along. It is indeed a grand mystery. However, no matter how sexy you may have been in an earlier decade, or how sexy you predict yourself to be in the future (if only your hair would grow back out and you’d lose twenty pounds!), if you’re not feeling sexy in the present the chances of someone noticing your potential is pretty much zilch.

So. Pittsburgh was a time of feeling despairingly disgusting and in that stretch of bad self-esteem I lost a large part of myself. I was stuck in what is known to most as “writer’s block”, which isn’t necessarily what a lot of people believe it is. Writer’s block is often described as having the inability to write, the inability to continue one's story, stuck on a chapter, the loss of imagination and foresight. This wasn't the problem. I could write. Oh, could I ever write… But I couldn’t write well. Not in the least. The perception of myself was nothing more than a pathetic, insecure, little teenager, and so I was writing like one. Without a computer I went through notebook after notebook, re-writing chapters to the fantasy novel I was working on at the time, all by hand. It became an obsession. Not a passion, Folks. An obsession. I couldn’t stop writing and fixing and re-writing and fixing, desperately trying to put my esteem back to where it should be. But it was hopeless. I could see my flaws and my immaturity and my inadequacy and my ignorance and my puny, disgusting, vile pile of self-esteem in every single sentence I wrote on every single page of notebook paper and hated myself with some of the worst self-hatred I’ve ever experienced. Nice image, isn’t it? I have a point to all of this, I promise…

My sexiness, what I deem as beautiful and desirable about myself, is wholly dependent on my creative talents. I’m a so-so looking woman with a few features I depend on for my esteem, but when it comes to being able to cope with who I am as a person, who I am as a desirable being on a whole, I depend greatly on my art and my writing. It is the one way I can confidently connect with people. It is what I use to love people. It is what I use to get noticed by men I’m attracted to. It is what I use to communicate the deepest parts of myself that I’m too scared to reveal face to face. Verbally, I’m a nightmare. I’m inarticulate and ridiculous when I’m under pressure to be witty and sociable. I also tend to be recklessly abrupt, awkward, abrasive, and sometimes brash when I speak in conversation and I tend to piss people off. I hate this about myself. So, I greatly depend on my art, my writing, my creative way of communicating to let people know what’s really going on in this psych ward of a melon on my shoulders. When I lost that in Pittsburgh? It was over. I was grieving over him, I had lost my esteem, and therefore lost my writing. I felt empty through and through. I needed to fill the holes, the voids, and when people have enough voids in their life they end up doing desperate things to fill them. Grief can turn you into someone you never thought would spawn into existence. No, wait. Correction: a sour self-esteem can turn you into someone you never thought would spawn into existence. I’d like to blame it on grief, but the truth of it is I was the one that left him. I was the one that chose the road. It was a mistake that I was torturing myself over. He had already met the girl, and was already moving on. Problem was, I was not. So, correction to my latter correction: it was more like a messy concoction of boiling grief, sour self-esteem, bitter regret and tasteless self –pity that drove me into being a person I never thought I’d see in myself.

I know that if you’ve read this far you deserve to read something juicy, so I’m cautiously (more cautiously than you know, actually) going to attempt to share some of these things I did to fill my voids. This stretch of embarrassment went in and out of stints over several years, so what I feed you will be bits and pieces of me living in Pittsburgh, Norristown, and my first return to Minnesota.

February 2

The truth of it, Reader, is that I’ve only fallen in love once. I take the matter (the falling in love part) quite seriously and can’t fathom the idea of it ever happening again. I think that this is where my heart strings hold a faulty wire. It’s an ironic story, I tell you. You won’t believe it, Reader. You won’t believe it at all, but it was here, in Minnesota, that I met him. It was here, in the high school I hated, in the town I despised, in the state that chewed me up and was dying to spit me out, that I fell in love.

To spare you the suspense and the long, god-awful tale, the ending of my love story is not that enthralling. He fell in love with someone else and married her after I finally made my escape from Minnesota and moved away. The irony, right? There has always been a part of me that has fought with the “what if” of the matter. What if I hadn’t moved away when I was twenty one? What if I had stayed… Would that have made a difference? But then I remind myself that moving around from state to city to city to state is not something that I regret at all. Without that living, I wouldn’t be who I am today. And I like who I am today. But there’s still that nagging ache that roams my heart from time to time, especially this time of year, when I long for the one I lost to someone else.

How do you define love, Reader? Romantic love, I mean. You know what I mean by romantic, right? Love and sex. Sex is not love. Love is not sex. But for some reason the two of them have to exist together to form a (ready for the cheese, folks? Get out your plate): love connection.

Love itself is a being all its own, if you want my own personal opinion. It’s the one action, feeling, emotion that cannot be explained logically no matter how hard one tries. It’s what separates us from the animals. I, as a human being, can consciously choose to be selfless to better another person’s life simply because I want to love them and want to make them happy without expecting anything in return and without ever using my good deed as manipulative leverage. Love is a pureness that very few people have been able to tap in to because, let’s be honest, in its truest form is really the essence of deity and sainthood. But let me ask you this: how conscious of an effort is it between two people who love each other, romantically? The phrase “fall in love” was devised for a reason, Folks. Sometimes, that’s exactly what it is: falling. And it’s as dangerous as hell.

I remember when I first saw him, actually. Chemistry is a funny thing. I think we use the word “chemistry” when we have no real explanation for that instantaneously compatible phenomenon that occasionally happens between two strangers. I can’t necessarily say the chemistry between him and I was mutual at first sight. I can be honest with myself. I’m pretty sure it was just on my end, those first moments. But it was intense for me, and I can remember every moment of the many moments it took to notice that he was supposed to be part of my life somehow.

I remember noticing a lot of people, really, in those first months in a new high school. It’s hard not to over-scrutinize your new environment, desperately trying to figure things out before you dare to wedge yourself in. Some faces stood out more than others for no real apparent reason. I’m an extremely intense observer as it is, Reader, and I have a memory like an elephant. Well… Allow me to clarify the latter: I have an extraordinary long term memory. I may not be able to remember what I did yesterday (hell, I can’t even remember what I did an hour ago…), but I can remember as far back to the age of two when I broke my collar bone. I can remember lying on the x-ray table and the nurse telling me to look up into the camera “at the birdie”. I never saw the damn birdie, and I remember being angry that she lied to me. I also remember that it was snowing that day. I remember the hideous orange seats in the emergency waiting area, and I remember a crying baby in a nearby room. I remember the crying baby because it was so atrociously loud, and because of its volume I imagined it being surrealistically huge, the size of a small whale. I still have the imagery of picturing an enormous baby in the room next to mine, and was scared to death of it. I was two years old. I have a good memory. I take everything in. I’m a walking sponge in a skirt. This, unfortunately, is both a curse and a blessing. In over-busy environments I have a tendency to get anxiety attacks thus prompting a primitive urge to run and hide in the nearest rabbit hole. On occasion I manage to pull off my other defense: invisibility. I can sometimes make myself so unnoticeable that nobody even knows I’m there, literally. That is what it was like, on that hour long bus ride to and from school that first year we lived out here. I studied my environment, trying to figure out which spot I could fit into. I felt no connection to anyone, and it frightened me. There was, however, one face I saw every morning as he got on to and off the bus. To this day, I don’t know what it was about him. I wasn’t sexually attracted to him, necessarily. His hair was far too long for my taste, and he hadn’t quite hit the growth spurt due to him the following year. There wasn’t anything special, really, just an unexplainable draw, a sort of spiritual pull toward his soul, his person. This, Reader, was an enigmatic, inscrutable force from some unknown god of fate that was telling all of my senses, “You fit, here.”

All of the years that followed, the friendship with him that developed, and the eventual confession to myself that I was in love with him, is still a perplexing tale that I still can’t understand. He was no prince charming, let me assure you, but he always held the door for me. He was cute, unpredictable. He had a few disagreeable habits (to put it mildly), but he was well mannered and kind to the people I cared about. He could be crass, quite blunt, and sometimes so outspoken it made your ears smoke, but these were the sort of things I was oddly turned on to. I loved his reliable honesty. There were no games, no lies, no fakery. But none of who he was and why I was attracted to him made any sense at all. It’s not as if there weren’t other men throughout the years with the same exact qualities. Honestly, it wasn’t about his qualities at all. He wasn’t anything that matched what I had in my fantasies, but before I knew it he was the only one starring in my dreams, and I couldn’t figure out why. I wasn’t choosing it. I felt as if love had chosen me for him and there was nothing I could do about it. Fate. Serendipity. All of those silly words you cringe at (or at least I do anyhow) in romance novels… Is that what it is? Is this how it happens? I may be of a creative, whimsical breed, Reader, but romantic love is something I never bought in to. As I was falling in love with him, I spent two years telling myself, “You’re a teenager, Jess. You only THINK you’re in love. It’s nothing but hormones and a crush.” But years went by, I got older and the teenage years were long past, and the love I had for him only grew and tormented me. The truth of it, Reader, is that my feelings for him frightened me. We were of two different worlds entirely. He was so experienced in life. I was not. He had that bad boy rep. I was the goody-goody. It was your everyday, class B rating, romantic, overdone cliché no doubt about it. My love story was as pathetic as that. But I couldn’t shake him from my heart as hard as I tried.

So I ask you, Reader: How do you define love? Romantic love… How do you stop it once it’s started? Why did it start in the first place? Why am I one of those people that can’t get over it? I know people who say they’ve loved two, even three, sometimes even more than three people in their lifetime. In my little world of feeling like I’ve only ever truly belonged to one man, truly loving him infinitely and unconditionally, this is beyond my understanding. I think this goes along with the fact that it’s rare enough as it is for me to be connected to ANY sort of person in any sort of relationship, and the idea of it happening in the same context twice in my lifetime is, to me, the sort of stuff fairy tales are made of. The full connection I had with the man I loved was more potent than I’ve ever had with any other person in my whole life (with the exception of only a few). And I wish I could tell you why, Reader, because the whole nonsensical mystery of the whole thing makes me out to be this seemingly desperate, vulnerable, foolish woman who needs to get the hell over it. If I could just figure out the logistics of the problem, I could fix it. I have a sneaking suspicion that my love for him is derived from this hidden psychological dysfunction in my brain (or heart), and good grief! If I could just get that medicated, I could go on my merry way and find love again. It can’t possibly be “fate” or “serendipity” or “true love”. But even if it is? My story is over anyway. He moved on. And that’s the way it is in real life. Not a lot of people have happy endings, and that’s just the way it is. “Such is life” as my mother always says.

So? We’re back to where we started:
How do you define romantic love? Madness. Why do you love the person you are with? Madness. Why did you choose them and not someone else? Madness. Was it because they chose you? Not really. Did you choose each other? Must have.

Was it a choice? Is it a choice? Is it something we’re imprisoned to, bound by uncertain gray laws of a spiritual world we’d much rather ignore? Is it something that sets us free? Liberation was definitely not in my cards, and I know plenty of others in relationships that have done more binding than freeing. Is it worth it? To love, or not to love. To choose, or not to choose. To fall, or not to fall. Do we really have a choice on whether or not we fall? I’m pretty sure once it starts there’s only one way to go: down. For some it’s a long lasting free-fall. Some hit the ground sooner than later. Some land gracefully and move on. I’ve hit the ground, and for some reason can’t stand up again. Spare me your judgments, Reader. Believe me, I’d love to get back up again if I could.
I’ve been through all sorts of phases, let me tell you. Grief turns you into someone you’re not typically familiar with. Recovering from loss can do things to you. If there’s anyone in the audience that can relate, and I know there are, you’ll want to keep reading. If you think I’ve made myself vulnerable so far, you just wait for the confessions soon to come.

February 1

There isn’t an artist, a writer, a dreamer, a practical, a mathematician, a bio chemist, a nautical engineer, a pin-striped salesman, an apron clad housewife, a plains hunter in a bungalow, a prince or pauper, drug dealer or saint, gay or straight, there isn’t one, single non-sociopathic soul on the entire earth who hasn’t struggled with believing in the existence of romantic love. But if Doc Brown can find his Clara, I would really like to believe we all can. In light of this holiday I feel I ought to contribute my own expressions on romantic love, especially because my story actually has to do with what this blog is about: Minnesota. I’ve planned out a fourteen day series of posts, one post per day until the grand holiday of Valentine's.

It’s funny. I had wanted to begin this series of posts with a contemptibly cliché introduction, something to the effect of: “There are many different kinds of love…” and then proceed to go through a list of categories, defining love in a corny, intellectual “self-help-handbook” sort of way. But then I came to my senses. There are only two kinds of love, Reader, and they can’t be explained with words of the brain. They have to be re-told with words of the heart, of the soul. I’m no expert on the matter, that is an undeniable truth (and those reading who know me are in grand agreement). All I know is what I’ve seen, felt, and experienced, and I’m here to share it in hopes that others can either say they understand what I’ve been through, or realize that there’s at least something to hope for. Hope for? That was deceiving, Reader. My love story, if that’s what you want to label it, isn’t that exciting, nor does it have a happy ending, and it certainly isn’t anything all too original. Despite these things, however, or maybe because of them, I can confidently say my story has merit in the long, great cosmic scheme of things. Or so I hope.

Like I said before, there are only two kinds of love. There is the sort of love between two people in any sort of relationship; and then there’s the sort of love between two people who have sex. The latter would be defined as romantic love, probably the most mysterious and complicated because of the sex factor. I’m not sure there’s anybody in history that has been able to define it, to explain it, to pin down the exact nature of the force and the truth of what it really is. You’ve either experienced it, or you haven’t. I’ve experienced it, but it wasn’t exactly pleasant. I’m not sure it ever is, truth be told. However, Reader, if you’ve had a positive experience with romantic love? I’d strongly encourage you to share it. Share it here, share it with others, write about it, tell about it: share it. ‘Because in all reality, it’s the only thing that will make believers out of the skeptics. It’s the only thing that will give romantic love’s existence a life force, a power that will only grow by faith. We’ve all been hurt by romantic love, and in many ways it has regrettably become our enemy. Hearts have been broken through betrayal, or the love hasn’t been returned in the way that we needed it to; or we’ve mistaken the obsession, the addiction, the crush, the necessity, the convenience, the infatuation, the excessive hormones, as true love. Some of us have found out how painfully wrong we can be on the matter, our senses consistently failing what only the deepest part of our souls can detect. I was always taught that love never fails, and that, Reader, is the truest test of all. Or so, I once believed. Love has failed, or I have failed at love, in so many ways in my life that it takes an awful lot of pep talking of the soul to keep me believing in its force. However, above all and through it all, and from the deepest parts of my being, I do believe that love itself is the one thing that keeps the universe connected, the one thing that separates the humans from the animals, the one thing that gives us purpose far greater than survival, and the one thing that saves us from damnation, whatever your interpretation of damnation may be. I’m not sure there is anybody in history that has been able to define it, to explain it, to pin down the exact nature of the force and the truth of what romantic love really is, but Reader? I’m about to attempt to.