I don't subscribe to the notion that love is work. The only three times I've been in love I made hardly any effort. I've given a ton of myself and made compromises and fought and bled and cried and suffered for the ones I love(d), but they could never be labeled as efforts.
I just did it because I was in love. No thought involved.
They all ended organically, which is to say that they ended because they became difficult to one of us, which means they required significant effort, which indicated one of us was no longer acting on blissful intuition, and therefore one of us was no longer in love.
That's my version, and I think you would get a similar synopsis if you polled the ex's.
When in love, I was sure that the future would never change. I wanted only to be flash-frozen and preserved in that very moment. I still wish it. I wish time did not move forward. That belief, that wish, has felled dynasties.
For me, I guess, that black and white version of the suit fits my shoulders, because I have not once gone back to a relationship that ended and have it suddenly work again.
I have to keep giving it my best and resist the temptation to put a fight to the natural order of things. If I resist, eventually my strength will deplete and I will be swept by the undertow, but if I give in, and trust that everything will be ok, then I'm certain I will suddenly find myself surfing a beautiful wave.
That is not just speculation speaking, that is experience. And I'm talking averages here, not about how you sway sometimes between pure adoration and disdain on any given day.
I fall in love easily. I am not talking about "love-love", as in when you ask someone if they "love, love him/her?" I'm talking about love, the single term you use to describe a feeling of utter happiness and general excitement. Like when you were 17 (or 25, or 39) and the person you liked also began to like you back in some conspicuous manner. Love in the sense of euphoria, love in the sense that everything horrible becomes invisible, love in the sense that only the present is important.
I often wonder if love is as simple as that Disney recipe, or if it is more like a firelog, spitting off black smoke with anticipation, suddenly erupting into flame, spitting and cracking and warming the air, and yet reduced to cold ash by morning?
I admit that over the last month I have suffered from writers block. I can't seem to put things correctly. I feel a bit better from admitting it but I am no less perturbed by it.
The frustrating part is that there is plenty going on upstairs but I feel like somehow, someone slipped a Brita Brain filter into me, and by the time the thoughts get to my fingers they lack all the impurity and rawness of the original thought.
And then today, I caught a good look at myself in the mirror, and I am not so familiar as the last time I looked. I look, I don't know, I look burdened and I look tired.
I am both, for sure, because I am at a crossroads again. I need to be in the unknown again. It seems, at present, to be the only place where I can be filter-free.
