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.