Lucky To Have You

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

~ Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

A week or so ago, I proposed the question 'could you fall in love with someone that you've never met', in regards to my starting to fall in love with someone 6000 miles away.  See, I have always been a logical person, always thinking with my head and not my heart, but this person changed that for me.  I allowed myself to forget how far away he was... how difficult it would be for us to ever meet, yet alone build a life together... along with a dozen other logistical questions.  None of that mattered though with a direct connection to our hearts, I threw caution to the wind.  At the time of the post, we had taken a step back, realizing some of the difficulties and were tortured with the idea of love lost, which only brought us together deeper throughout the week that I was gone.  I was happy... my creative juices were flowing... I had felt as though I had met my soulmate... someone who was able to crack the hard exterior of me and get down to my core, unlocking things that I didn't think were possible after being guarded.  Was this true love?  Was it possible with multitudes of communication via email and chat and a face picture to develop such strong feelings.  The answer is yes.  My imagination envisioned him in every scenario we talked about... from laying in bed to sitting in a business meeting to eating breakfast to sipping tea.  And many times, I envisioned myself right next to him.

On the morning that I was going to write a post announcing my deep love, I received some more pictures from him, and to my shock, they looked nothing like the picture I originally had, explained that it was taken 5 years prior, and I sat there feeling that my whole world had fallen apart.  Many things went through my head, including thoughts that he had lied about who he was and I started to question everything he ever said and how things played out.  I immediately felt like the guy I fell in love with died... much like when you idolize a celebrity and then you meet them and they're not at all what you expected, and then you mourn the person that you had in your head... which is called disinfranchised grief.  After a few friends looked at the before and after pictures and couldn't find a resemblance either, I struggled to find the connection to the 'new' person, after all, the feelings that I had were directly connected with that person's heart, weren't they?  The problem was that I couldn't see this new person in any of the scenarios previously mentioned... and the words he said took on new meanings and his reaction took on a persona that I couldn't see coming from the original person.  To be fair, I was trying to understand what he was going through... imagine someone looking at your picture and saying it wasn't you because their mind couldn't pick up on the similarities.  And I tried... I really tried to find those and asked for help in recognizing them, but he was mostly feeling attacked, which I can understand.  I'm not saying he's a liar or was trying to mislead me... I just wanted him to want to show me, and he retreated, somewhat showing a slight admission of guilt... or that he didn't care enough to fight.  There's a saying... if you walk away and they don't come after you, keep walking.  The strong person who had been through so much prior recoiled into a shell, further shielding himself from me.  It was like someone had come along and snatched him up... and replaced him. 

I'm not blaming him for this.  We are victims of circumstance in a situation that was a long shot to begin with, but a travesty in the name of love, regardless.  And while I could say perhaps if we could not survive the first bump in the road, we wouldn't have lasted to begin with... I am sad, none the less, for many reasons.  I am mourning the death of the person in my mind, based on his original picture, that I fell in love with to begin with... looking in his eyes, being illuminated by his smile, feeling his energy and having been inspired by his words and all the good that it brought out in me.  I am also sad because his reaction to all of this makes me question what it really was to begin with... did I falsely interpret my feelings or who he was?  And am I a bad person because this love/heart/mind connection that I have cannot be transferred to another face?  He's the same person, right... and supposedly the same person in the two pictures, just looking different.  I just can't wrap my head around it, even still.

As the poem at the beginning states, we have to be open to love, regardless of the risks and hurt that is involved... and it's much better to have lived and loved and been hurt than not not to love at all.  I am so appreciative for what he brought out in me... the love... the feelings... the creativity... and the ability to take a risk.  I am lucky to have had him in my life.

I've been listening to this song for a few months now... but never really listened to the words.  Considering that he lives overseas and were supposed to be meeting for the first time in a few weeks... and that I was just away on a tropical island sitting by a window feeling the breeze and thinking about him and he thought about hopping on a plane to meet me in Cancun... it's uncanny how perfect it is for this situation.