Day: December 21, 2016

Love is hard and stupid.

There is no eloquent way to phrase it. Love exposes your deepest wants and needs–and yes, we do need. We need human touch. We need to be loved. We are a collective species. But when we love we risk hurting others and being hurt ourselves. It makes no logical sense. It is, as the Vulcans say, illogical.

But it is also inevitable. And beautiful. It is a waterfall at sunrise, the rush of water and mist and rays of a new day sun warming the skin, wrapping you in a cloak of sensation that only comes from this moment. It is belonging. It is feeling safe and needed. It is purpose itself.

And it is foolish and deadly. More people die from a broken heart than perhaps any other affliction ever created by God or man. Perhaps ‘Broken heart’ never finds its way to the medical report or tombstone, but the cause is the same. In the absence of love we are shells and automatons performing the mechanisms of daily life.

I have been in love my entire life, each drum beat of love stronger than the last; a heart being born and made stronger by affection. I am in love now and it carries me forward on a wave that crests and falls and rises again like that heartbeat that first brought me into the world and will in time carry me away from it. I love, I grow, I hurt, I love again. I share this cycle with a single woman and she with me. Together we feel these things. We love each other.  We grow together. We hurt each other without meaning to.

In the end our love carries us forward. It is beautiful and dangerous and illogical and stupid and everything wonderful about life.

Monday nights I blog from my BBQ and Bourbon spot outside my second favorite bookstore (Half Price Books still holds all the cool points because of an untouchable selection of vintage books). I use the time to be alone and take in a world that I am not a part of. I’ve come to know the waitstaff and appreciate their familial camaraderie with each other. I am recognized as a regular and appreciated in that sense, but the gems are the food and unfamiliar faces that move through the restaurant as though it were a way station between moments in their daily lives.

As a writer I am first an observer of the human condition (and fully aware of how pretentious that sounds). I see, for example, the crowd of eight men all fitted with beards in various stages of known cool. Two of the men are joined by girlfriends and as a result living on the fringes of the conversation but positioned at the center of the table. I see three ladies barely past their teens and painted in fashions that mark their upbringing and allegiance to the particular styles and cultures that divide them but in the same make them a collective. Each bears a gift that they will exchange at meals end. For now they chat and visit cellphone notices with equal importance. Perhaps they imagine each others lives as their own, and this is a kind of escape from the lives they have.

It is only a glimpse and all I can share in 10 minutes.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. This was written last night and posted today. I get pretty lazy post BBQ.