This Kind of Love

In this time apart, I’ve learned so much.

I learned that I spent many years trying desperately to recreate an intense but fleeting feeling that I had with a past lover – lusting for the high created when two beings fall for the same illusion.

The past was that kind of love, the kind of love that overwhelms and consumes you with intensity. It was the kind of love that reminds you of home, but only the best of it and not the worst.

The intensity of that love never had its chance to fade naturally and the more we forced it to go away, the more we exacerbated the power the fantasy lover held over me.

I spent so much time in our relationship comparing and judging my feelings, wondering why they weren’t as strong for you as they were for him, years forcing them to be other than what they were.

And us?

I spent years thinking I chose with my head instead of my heart, but I’m starting to think it is something else all together.

All those times I stopped myself from running, maybe it wasn’t the chatter of a freaked out mind, but a soul that knew what lessons it needed in this life.

What we have is a different kind of love. It’s not as intense, nor does it fully consume. Our small selves can stomp their feet and demand that love be the way we see it in the movies, but real love is different. We are being given an opportunity to allow it to be the way it is and not the way we think it should be.

So we may never dance till 3 a.m. and tell ourselves we lived a lifetime in a single night.

Because our love is not one in which we can pretend to lose the self in the other.

What we have is the kind of love that reminds us of the solitude of living.

It’s the kind that reminds us that love is more than just the mind’s preferences.

It’s the kind of love that teaches you to give without the expectation of receiving.

It’s the kind of love that shows you what it really means to fully accept another as they are, and not as how you wish them to be.

It’s the kind of love that hurts because our differences make us collide.

But with all that friction, I think it smooths us out.

Our relationship has shown me that as much as we yearn to join, to merge, to be more than what we are alone, there will always remain an empty space. This world that we live in gives us so much for us to try to fill it with: lovers, products, homes, and pretty things.

And it is that fear of emptiness that keeps us running and chasing and running and chasing, and consuming and looking for the next best thing. That emptiness feels unquenchable, but only as long we keep on trying to fill it with things, or people outside of ourselves.

But, what if we saw that emptiness as the womb of receptivity where creativity is born?

This emptiness that is not filled by the other begs of us to take responsibility and to make the way in which we live our lives through our art.

How might we paint this blank and spacious canvas? How might the way in which we lead our lives become our art?

So yes, our love is unlike the one I had before.

It’s a different kind of love. It has the potential to be real love, if we choose it.