Right here waiting

Oh, can't you see it baby
You've got me going crazy

Wherever you go
Whatever you do
I will be right here waiting for you
Whatever it takes
Or how my heart breaks
I will be right here waiting for you

I thought my happiness was without end. I thought that since we had naturally gravitated toward each other, it would be a simple thing to get together and be sweethearts until our hearts gave out in our golden years.  Of natural causes, not of exhaustion, like I don't feel like loving her anymore.  Of a coronary disease, maybe, not some mysterious happenstance, like where is the love we used to know?

Where did it go? I don't know. Maybe it was too beautiful to last. Maybe the deities who bestowed this wondrous gift on me decided they could not extend their generosity any further. Maybe it wasn't love at all.  Maybe it was merely a sweet but insignificant friendship, that in my romantic delusion I had exaggerated into a grand love affair. 

  

Even to this day, when I have successfully convinced myself and unsuccessfully convinced my friends that I have fallen out of love with her, I cannot help but cast one last glance in her direction every time she says goodbye and starts to walk away to an existence entirely separate from my own.  I keep my eyes on her until the last hair on her head is out of sight, trying to preserve every detail of her appearance in my memory until the time I will see her again.

I loved her smile most of all.  It must have been the same smile which ignited the sun to shine for the storm to be overwhelmed.  Swirling masses of dark clouds and slowly, one by one, little fingers of light coalesce to reveal a brilliant arc of colored light in the sky.  I remember how she used to smile at me when we'd pass each other in the school corridors.  Reflexively I'd smile back, grinning like silly, my meager lips stretched up to my ears, my face dangerously close to splitting.  She'd give me that dazzling smile of her and everything would stop just like that.  It was as if the world had ceased to exist; it was only me and her: her glistening retainers made the vertiginous dance of my heart.

  

Call it stupidity, call it insanity, call it obsession, call it infatuation, call it whatever you want, it was love, sweet bittersweet love.  With love, as with faith, if you believe that's justification enough, no explanation is necessary.  If you do not, no explanation is possible.  When you are blessed enough to love, it will change you in so many ways you can never be the same again.

Love means different things to different people, different things at different times.  Like everything, it changes.  It waxes and wanes like the moon.

In all my years of loving one girl with all the love my heart could hold, I learned that no matter where I went, no matter what I did, no matter who I was with, there was only one person for me, no matter if she long ago ceased to feel the same way.  It was not her fault that I was so unhappy for so long, it was simply my misfortune, my cross to carry.  In spite of everything, I am a better person, and I will forever be indebted to her for teaching me how it is to love.  Never mind that her teaching was done mostly in absentia.  I madly, deeply, truly loved her.  I hope never to dishonor that love by engaging in cheap flings with whoever catches my fancy at the moment.

  

It is never easy to lay open the door to your heart, because love and rejection get in the same way.  Love is not for the faint-hearted.  I loved once, and later I am still reeling from it.  Having survived one heartbreak has not lessened my fear of going through another.  Thus I envy people who can plunge headlong into relationships after but just some tentative attempts at getting to know another person.  I envy people who can meet strangers and shortly afterward declare that they were meant for each other.  I envy those who are not afraid to go after their happiness and damn the consequences.  I envy people who can go from conquest to conquest without feeling diminished by it.

I can never be like them.  I don't think like them.  Once you've tasted manna from heaven, why bother with bread from the baker?  Nothing compares with it.

  

One love, one lifetime — that is my hope.

I wonder how we can survive this romance
But in the end if I'm with you,
I'll take the chance...

~quickmelt

Posted in: Special BLogs