If I could wonder my life away, I don’t know if I would be completely happy. I think I would be close to it, but there is always this part of me that craves some connection. No matter how much I strive for the spiritual centeredness of being ok alone, there’s still something in me that wants to be with someone. That wants to be loved, that desires connection. I look at couples and I try and see myself in love, canoodling with someone, sharing small intimate moments; that singular connection between two people. I think ‘that would be nice’ but I just can’t see myself being that close to someone, trusting someone that much ever again (that sounds so high school doesn’t it). I like to think I have worked through all my issues, I like to think I am spiritually centered and well - I am not. Some days I hang on to the past like it is a lifeline to my present existence.
Maybe had I not tried in the end to make my marriage work I wouldn’t have found hope in an “us”. Maybe had she not built a relationship with someone else – something I deserved without a doubt - but maybe had neither of those things happened I would be able to jump into possible loves with eyes wide shut. Maybe had the gaslighting of 2015 never occurred I wouldn’t be here today. Maybe if the person I chose to trust in after my divorce wasn’t a complete narcissist, I would be freer with intimacy.
I’ve always been affected quite deeply when it came to matters of the heart, held on with the strength of 10 men to what I thought was love. I had fallen in love with my best friend’s girl when I was 15, oh I was so enamored by her. We would share these moments when no one was looking, tiny brief beautiful moments of silent stairs or fingers touching when passing a cigarette, moments that I packed deep into my heart. It didn’t end well, I betrayed my boy by fooling around with her. Although the betrayal came way before that, I was so wrapped in her I couldn’t see it. I was so deeply in love, I would of done anything to be with her and I pretty much did. Or how about the one I followed across the U.S. She had been my middle school sweetheart and she moved away in the 9th grade. 6 months after graduating high school I took a Greyhound to Florida to be with her, I just knew we were meant to be. She ended up getting a boyfriend when I got there. God thinks he’s funny sometimes.
I’ve always been in love with being in love and willing to make any sacrifice for it. I’ve always mistaken love for my need to be loved, it brought the pain’s and misery as it should have – a selfish love will do that to you. My love, as devotional as it was, was always selfish, throughout my entire life. It’s always been about my needs above anyone’s else’s no matter how bad I wished it not to be, no matter how I masked it to you and myself. I had no idea about selfless or unconditional love, I only had ego lying to me, fear maneuvering me and low self-esteem keeping me warm at night.
I think I can look back to most all my relationships and they all involved a range of selfishness, I don’t know if any one person can look at their relationships and see anything different. I mean normally they don’t start out with selfish motives, unless you’re in real need of therapy. They normally start out with a look, seeing that someone for the first time and that moment captures you and pins you against the wall. Then the thought, the first thoughts, the star stuck thoughts, the thoughts that not only pins you against the wall but also steals your breath away. The possibilities run through your imagination and you become entangled in their beauty. I like those thoughts, no no, I love those thoughts. I wonder if it’s selfish of me to fall in love with your beauty above your mind, to covet all I see and steal away your looks for my own little world. Should I not know you before I fall down that flight of stairs to land at your feet and gaze at you from a heap of nonsense on the floor. Should your heart and mind not matter more than the way your eyes rest upon your face, then the way your lips move when you speak.
Maybe this isn’t wrong, to fall in love at first sight, but does this feeling not propel me into being with you because I think your beautiful and I want to devour you physically and I will find a way to be attracted to you mentally. Is that not a selfish love if it's a love at all? Is there such thing as a physical love or is that just lust? Cause reality is that.. Reality is that... I don’t know what the reality is, I just got lost in all that gibberish.
Love is selfish, my love has always been that way it seems, it was confining and controlling and fear based. Once you start exploring unconditional love it changes the way you see it, the way it’s meant to be understood. I really don’t know if I will ever know how to be in a relationship again and love someone like I used to. How do you love someone with no expectations or conditions? How do you love someone with no expectations or conditions? How do you love someone, with expectations or conditions?
I see why devout Buddhists do not get into intimate relationships.
Matters of the heart are a tangled mess of bliss. They are complicated and ugly and painful, just as much as they are kind and sweet and heaven sent. I have the biggest feeling of happiness for those who have found their one, who have cracked the code of this crazy engagement. I think for us who have not found our “one” or who have lost it for one reason or another, we believe there is more than one, I mean we need to believe that right. We look at all those couples together for years upon years upon decades, making our judgements to console our own feelings about love. Attached to it, flirting with hope and desire for it. No one wants to really speak on this, our ego wants us to look good, be independent – there is such a stigma about wanting to be in love it seems. Like it’s not ok to desire such things. But the heart wants what the heart wants, we crave connection even when we don’t want to, we are not solitary creatures. Since the dawn of time we have lived for one another and needed companionship. I mean look at how many single people have cats and dogs, warm bodies are needed, affection is needed and once we need we fall back into desire, conditions, demands and a selfish love is brought to the forefront.
Maybe my view on this is all skewed, maybe this is past experiences displaying themselves in jaded opinion of myself. I’m not rightly sure. I do know that to love freely and unconditionally takes great spiritual centeredness, a security in self and acceptance of each moment as they arise, unattached. I also know that its this moments perception, this moments feeling, it may stay, it may go. Either way I am at peace with it and the reality is I will be alone, I will fall in love, I will be hurt, I will be happy, I will live in most every feeling I have already traversed and possibly some new ones will be added. Hopefully through it all I will be focused on that selfless love, that unattached selfless love.
Namaste 🙏🏻
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