Love is always complicated, rarely convenient, and never leaves us unaltered.
After years of prospecting for love as if it were gold, I've learned there are never any guarantees. I've searched for it in all of life's places and spaces where odds were I was certain to discover a glittery nugget (or maybe two, or more) in my pan amid all the dirt and gravel. Sometimes I was lucky, sometimes deceived (lust is dazzling but is like pyrite, which only looks like gold), and more often than not I got stuck with nothing but grainy mud.
The next thing I learned was just because you find it, it doesn't mean it's yours. Or, at least, yours to keep forever. You can lose it or it can be taken away. Or maybe you simply change your mind and give it up or toss it out for someone else to treasure. But often it endures, although it can take different shape; after all, like gold it's virtually indestructible but malleable.
And yet, whatever happens by choice or chance it doesn't change the very nature of love: it is rare, valuable, and highly reflective -- it shields us from the sometimes oppressive heat of truth and warms us from cold, cold reality. And, of course, if you're lucky -- or maybe just a really good prospector -- then you could possibly feel very rich.
But the one thing I know for sure is that once you find it -- no matter what the outcome -- you're never quite the same afterwards. Love changes us.
I remember my first true heartbreak like it happened only earlier tonight. I fell hopelessly in love with a man who wasn't mine, although I was sure he would be. He HAD to be; we were so perfect for each other. He said she wasn't as passionate as I was, nor as affectionate or alive. But they'd been together for so many years, had practically grown up together and shaped each other -- everyone just knew they would end up together. But now he wasn't so sure.
So as he was leaving for his usual holiday trip back home, he said he planned to talk to her. We spent everyday together before he left and soaked up every golden moment as if we didn't want to waste a single one. We kissed all the time, like we were making up for all the kisses we'd miss. He promised as soon as he returned he would see me right away. I couldn't wait.
The day he came back I knew what flight he'd be on; I knew the plane left on time and was arriving exactly when it was supposed to. I knew how long it would take for him to go through customs, pick up his baggage, get into his car, and be back at my place. But I knew nothing.
With every hour he still wasn't at my door, my mind came up with ever-shifting, constantly changing scenarios that would explain his delay. The lines were long, it took forever for his baggage to arrive, he had to go home first to shower and change (of course he did!), his car wouldn't start -- but why hadn't he phoned yet?
And finally my phone rang. He said he got home when he was supposed to but found his car battery dead due to weeks of remaining cold so he had to take care of that first -- but now he was finally coming over. (See? I was right after all.) I never asked what else he did during all those hours he wasn't with me; it didn't matter, or perhaps I was also too scared to find out. Then finally the doorbell rang; I ran to answer it and saw him standing there. My heart leapt and I wanted to throw my arms around him and kiss him until we couldn't breathe. But his eyes were cold, almost like the dead battery he had to replace; I realized immediately I was about to be discarded too.
He told me she had realized she was losing him, and so he came home and found her a changed person. She said it was going to be better -- that she was going to be better. Now she was all the things she once wasn't and that I was, but they had all that history, all that certainty. And they were meant to be together after all.
I remember thinking as he spoke so carefully, so guiltily (I think he even felt sorry for me.): how is it possible to know the last time you kiss someone that it's going to be the last time? And if you knew it was, would you do anything differently if you could? I remember sitting on the couch as he sat across facing me. He had his face in his hands, and when he looked at me it was as if he were pleading with me to understand. He kept saying he was sorry, and I knew he sincerely was.
But I sat frozen. What was happening now was too surreal, it was completely unlike what I'd imagined over and over while I was waiting all that time for him. I think I mumbled that it was okay, I understood, I might have even wished him all the best. But I was too afraid to move or speak; I felt if I did parts of me would break apart and fall away.
Which is exactly what happened once he walked out the door. All the hope I held drained away, and my dessicated heart cracked into millions of tiny fissures, fell apart and crumbled into dust. I wasn't the same after that; I joined the ranks of the walking wounded. I clutched my new heart protectively as if knowing it would break again -- which it did, of course, time and again -- and eventually learned how to deal with loss without falling apart. Or at least looking like I wasn't, that everything remained intact.
I think I learned that day that just because you could love someone so completely and assuredly, it doesn't mean you've earned the right to receive that same kind or degree of love. You choose to give it with absolutely no promises or conditions, or at least you have to be willing not to expect anything in return. You choose to decide what you want to do whether or not you get what you give. And it only makes it so much sweeter if love comes back to you.
Which it did -- eventually -- even if he never did.
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