Love

I want to be in love again.

That actually seems a silly thing to me to say.  For one, I don't necessarily believe in "being in love" so much as the concept that you LOVE a person - not "feel" love, but actually practice the actual loving of a person.  It seems to me a hell of a lot harder to fully love a person and practice that - you love them even when they are not loveable.  Falling in love is easy - I've fallen in love with a piece of cheese or a good steak in the moment.  But, we all know that feelings are not constant (which, believe me, is thick with irony considering how often we say we "feel" one thing or another), therefore "falling in love" hardly becomes the optimal way in which to approach a long-term meaningful relationship.

But, there it is - I want to be in love again.

I have been in love - and, at times in my life, I've thought I was in love when really it was some weird, Freud-go-wake-up-your-mother chase after something unreal (too many stories, too long) to be called love at the crack of dawn, but - nevertheless - I can say I've been in love.  My most recent love could be categoried a mistake, but the romantic in me insists that it was altruistic, and meaningful.  The "mistake" part comes in from the rush of incredible pain at the end (normally the way these things work out, huh).  It's easy - and most of us do it - to simply mark it off as a mistake and let defense mechanisms take over (that is their job after all).  But, my insatiable desire for truth and honesty in my own life (only to me - not necessarily outward) insists on something more - it insists that I strip off the pain and look at things objectively, even while stark naked wondering why the f*** it hurts so bad.  The objective piece is that loving with reckless abandon gives my life meaning.  The simple act of actively loving a woman gives me an opportunity to give fully through a capacity that I only find there.  The loving, itself, galvanizes me into a frenzy of action and emotion unparalleled by other life choices.  And, truth be told, I miss it.  Even in those echoing voices of haunting regret and sadness, I still miss it.

Don't get me wrong, those voices are loud and have facts on their side - they remind me, very quickly and acutely of what life becomes when pain becomes introduced.  But, if you'll pardon a sudden analogy, it's like eating microwave meals all your life, or having to prepare a fine meal for yourself each night from scratch.  Yes, it's a pain to make the meals, but the outcome easily overshadows the tastless homogony of microwave meals.  OK, horrid example.  Giving of myself - even if I love a woman who cannot appreciate it, sparks something in me that normally lies dormant.  While loving often introduces enormous pain as well, the blandness of life without it screams at me with a dull yet full voice which must be answered at some point, lest it drive me to insanity.  I fear blandness of mediocrity more than the pain of risk.  I think.

In these moments, I do.  Although during the pain moments, I sure wish for the numbness of my single lifestyle in the shelter of my apartment, only reachable through technology easily turned off.

Anyway, I long to love and be loved again.