Love is Everything

While crying with a broken heart, I think, "I'd take a root canal while getting a brazilian wax on a cold day and then maybe even give birth with no drugs and fall inside a frozen pond naked- over this pain. I would take anything over this pain." And then my next thought, bumping in right behind that one, practically crashing with it, is, "No, no I wouldn't. This pain means I have a working loving open heart. This pain means I'm alive. The magnitude of this pain equals the magnitude of the love I lived. I'll take this over the alternative of never having lived through so much love." And I cry even harder.

And every time it's worse (or better?). Every time the love is greater, and the crashing pain of loss greater still. And what hurts, exactly? Pablo Neruda, that eternal romantic, wrote,

"We, we who were, we are the same no longer. ...

Love is so short and oblivion so long."

How many times have I gone through this? Apparently not enough times, because my heart is still perfectly willing to love, it is yearning to love again, it is ready to fall in love with the guy with long hair and a guitar in the subway. It is hoping to look at someone and see in their face all of humanity's perfections and all of humanity's imperfections and love them so much, so deeply, so entirely, so tremendously, that there is nothing to do but kiss them as passionately as possible, forever.

I'm bottomlessly romantic, boundlessly sensitive, overly poetic, and a tad bit dramatic, I know. But I can't help it! I love loving! And love loves finding me, it always has. No matter how much it hurts me, it seems love and I and have a life-long date this time around. Bring it on Cupid, this heart ain't done lovin' yet.

I remember when I was in the 9th grade, I was with a group of people chatting about what love is, and one girl said, "Romantic love is completely unnecessary and we can be perfectly fine without it." I responded immediately and viscerally- it's possible that I even jumped up to standing- I said, "How can you say that? How can you possibly say that? It's the whole point! There's nothing better! There's nothing greater! Love is everything!" I think she rolled her eyes at me, I don't really remember. But you see my point- even at 14, in the hell of high school, I already had the suspicion that love is life. And now, ten years later, with a desperate broken heart that has been mended over and over again, that is full of a kind of pain that is capable of taking over my whole being and paralyzing me for days, I believe that still.

But (ugly icky stubborn but), something has changed.

I know now that, in the same space that passionate crazy beautiful pure love inhabits, also lives the possibility of a deadly painful merciless end. In that first kiss where love plants its seeds it also plants the possibility that those two people may hurt each other brutally and irreparably. The greater the love, the greater the possibility of that pain. (I should say probability rather than possibility, because I have not yet lived a great love that was not accompanied by a hurricane of pain, but who knows- maybe it's out there.)

And because I know this, I understand something I absolutely rejected and ran away from for a long time. I understand now why people settle. I don't mean settle down, I mean settle for something that is less than what they wanted, settle for an adult life of "should's" and "at least's" and "good enough's". I understand choosing stability and companionship over passion and mind-blowing love. I understand choosing a life that minimizes the possibility of suffering a great loss.

I understand it so much that today I even said, "I could do it. I could settle." And I meant it. I started to think I could be ok with having just the certainty that the person I'm with will be there the next day over explosive, soul-connected, blinding love where no such certainty exists. Flames, by definition, burn out or fade away. So enough flames, I've been thinking, I'm done with flames. Let flames go to hell where they belong. Give me luke-warm. Give me boring. Give me less than I have always wanted.

Alas, says the romantic day-dreamer, such thoughts are real but fleeting. I no sooner have them than I am ready to fall madly in love again.

But, as a dear friend said to me today, I don't have to decide or choose anything right now, maybe even for a while. I can decide to not decide. It's every empowering, actually. I don't have to narrow down what I want right away- or ever. How great that I know love and love's pains, how great that I understand the sentiment behind settling, how great that I have no idea what will suit my life! I am ever-changing, ever-growing, and ever-learning. That is wonderful and I better get used to it because I can not control it. It just so happens that I can't click a switch in my heart and go, Ok, I'm done falling in love, now just give me something safe.

It is comforting to know that I am in pain, but I am not done loving yet.

As my 14-year-old self would say, I better not be done with love yet, because then really, what would be the point? Love is everything.

And isn't it?