I knew I sounded crazy, for lack of a better term, and I was "crazy" in love.
I've not had many great loves in my life.... but I've been blessed to have some... and I would consider this person one of them. From the moment we met, we both agreed that it was as though we had known each other forever.... almost since the beginning of time. The first time we met, we compared it to the Barenaked Ladies song, "It's All Been Done," because the whole weekend felt like an intense series of deja vu experiences, one right after the other. See the video below if you have no idea what I'm referencing.... though clearly BNL weren't singing about people, but about the nine lives of a cat.
But I digress.....
I'm sure everyone who reads this blog knows how I felt, and that I don't fall often, but that when I do fall, it is fast and hard. My dad knows this too; we are very similar in the way we deal with our emotions, and he has always taught me to see the good in people. We both see the good, sometimes to a fault.
"Sissy," he said. "Just don't be too hungry. I just don't want you to get hurt." I knew what he meant; he wanted me to lower my expectations about this relationship and this person, not to be so insistent that things work out if it turned out that they clearly weren't working.
But at the time, I thought to myself , "I won't let it get to that point. I'm not desperate."
And then, it happened. The man in question and I were having what I'll term a "lively discussion" concerning an e-mail that I had sent, imploring him (I suppose I could even use the word begging here) not to run again. He had just come back into my life after another absence, and I had this feeling (call it woman's intuition) that he was about to bolt again. I loved him, and I didn't want to lose his companionship, so I was asking him to just hang with me... to give it a real chance....
And you know what he said? He said I sounded desperate.
And you know what else? He was right.
I was. I wanted to feel from this person, just once, that he felt the same love for me as I did for him.
I wanted to feel for 5 seconds like I could be sure he wasn't going to up and leave the next time a pretty girl walks by or he meets someone kinda cool on plentyoffish or okcupid.
He had been using me like a revolving door, going into and out of my life on a whim here and there, chasing whichever girls looked more desirable to him at the moment. Sometimes these quick comings-and-goings would involve rash actions. Sometimes, he would completely blindside me with his affections for another person, but every time, I could sense a change in him beforehand. I could never quite articulate what was about to happen... but I knew "the winds of change were blowin' wild and free..."
And then, on the heels of another wind, he would come back, and say that he loved me... and for whatever reason, I'd believe him.
We repeated this cycle over and over. Why would he lie, I thought? Love is a choice. He doesn't have to love me, but he is choosing to do so.
No. He was choosing to love himself. It was never about me, always about him. We'd be fine for awhile. He'd leave for some other woman. He'd come back after it didn't work, and he'd always say that he didn't want a relationship because:
1. he needed to focus on him.
2. he didn't want to jump in.
3. he'd been hurt before and didn't want to repeat the past.
Ok, fine. But can you really say that you love someone, and then in the same breath say that you promise them... absolutely nothing?
Not next week? Not tomorrow? Not even the rest of the day, if you don't feel like it?
What is love if if it doesn't involve at least a short-term unspoken commitment?
Well, I can tell you what it's not.
It's actually not love. Lust, maybe. Dependency, maybe. Boredom, maybe. But not love.
And just like that, my "not love" vanished in the middle of a text conversation about juvenile delinquency last Thursday...
Am I surprised? No, I could sense it was about to happen.
Besides, it's all been done before.
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