Love, Life, Actually

Human beings are truly the amazing species. We have free will and choice, we laugh, we love, we love, we learn. We make mistakes over and over. Some of us keep all our mistakes original - some keep making the same ones over and over again, never to figure out what exactly we are doing wrong that prevents us from fixing these mistakes. Some of us are bound by the invisible threads of our childhoods - threads that either bound families tightly together with love, loyalty and devotion - or threads that strangled us and cut off those very same emotions, leaving us with nothing upon which to build the foundation for a future.

Some, like myself, who fell into the latter category, somehow managed to pour something akin to a solid foundation but never failed to see the cracks - invisible to most, but clearly visible to me. Throughout my life, I kept tripping over those cracks, getting caught in them, because there were gaps and spaces in my life for which I had no information or tools or knowledge to fill. Thus the cracks, thus the constant tripping. I always thought I just had big pterodactyl feet. My Tuesday morning meetings with someone has made me see otherwise. I suppose I've always known, though, it wasn't my big feet. But when success seems just an arm's length away, there comes with great clarity the realization that everything in your life - my life - has always been an arm's length away. So close, but yet so far away.

Humans are blessed with the ability to love, to generate emotions so powerful, so replete with energy and passion and devotion it is mind-boggling to comprehend. As an individual, I always thought I knew what I wanted in a mate. I knew my needs, my wants, my passions and I figured out that a mirror image of myself - not outwardly but inwardly - would be my true soul mate, the person for whom I could generate all that energy that intertwines love and passion and devotion so well.

I thought I had found that person - finally. I was not searching, I was not looking - he just happened. And I fell in love with this person, quite unexpectedly only to be told time and time and time again over the past four years that he did not feel the same way.

To love without being loved in return is an indescribable pain. You think you can love enough for both of you but it does not work that way. Humans are not meant to love one-sidedly. Love can be equated to a garden - it can grow but only with sustenance - warmth, sunlight and nurturing. With those simple components, it will flourish.

Without them, the beauty and brilliance of that garden will go unseen to the beholder and that very same garden will one day die.

Something inside of me has died. I cannot put my finger on it but I looked inside of me tonight and saw the dull, withered remains of emotions that were once brilliant and beautiful.

I do not believe that love truly dies in the sense of the word. It is more like a flame that simply winks out and all that's left are the wisps of smoke - memories of what may or may not have been.

I equate love to a garden because there is always the possibility that someone else will come along and bring it back to life, but plant different flowers, find new spaces and places upon which to coax new brilliance, new beauty with his warmth, his sunlight, his love.

Sometimes I step back and shake my head because it's hard for me to imagine that my human body - the tangibleness of it - is designed and engineered to generate intangibles: love, passion, loyalty, devotion, happiness, sadness, rage, elation. I cannot "see" my emotions but I feel them as deeply as if they wrap themselves around us like colorful ribbons.

And when those emotions are crushed and scattered with a few simple words by someone who has taken and never once given, it is difficult to believe that I as a human being can ever generate those emotions again.

But I know me very well.

And this knowledge is the most amazing thing about human beings, about me: We live, we love, we lose. But we can live and we can love again. The past is concrete - it is etched in stone, it is permanent. Nothing can change what has already occurred. Words cannot be taken back, and certainly, love can't be taken back like a dress that is too big or too small.

Love does not come with a receipt or a warranty and certainly, as I have learned, love does not come with a guarantee. But love changes, it shifts, it blends like paint colors on an artist's palette. And there is always the possibility that someone else may paint those colors of love into something more brilliant and beautiful than before.

So here I am, I live on, I change, I shift, I blend. I am resilient. I have reservoirs of strength that I have yet to test. The cracks in my foundation are still there but I intend to fill them in, smooth them over and walk without tripping or faltering.

But I have discovered that I am the beauty and brilliance of my own garden - and that will never die.