Contemplating Love

I once loved of the madly, deeply sort. It began to end long before it did, and killed whatever it was in its downward spiral toward hell. But I loved in the it's better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all kinda way.

I have been wondering lately if the Starter really just was a taste of what's possible. Or if I'll always be as unsure (and let's be honest here, it's not really uncertainty. It's absolute, simple, shameful fear) as I am now about letting love happen.

I can feel the fear burrowing deep into my gut. The question I'm now asking myself, after being asked point blank by a friend, is whether I will keep sabotaging any chances at love, as I've been doing since the Starter and I parted ways.

It's all around me, love. It's in every direction. Yet, my comfort level keeps it on the other side of a wall a meter's length from me. And I really wish I was brave enough to tear down the wall.

The end.

The Starter, part 2

While his niece spends her summer with me, I've reflected quite a bit on my great failed relationship these past days.

We were never a good match. Bound by obsession, fear, and madness, we stayed together out of our inability to imagine life without that security we found together and in one another. And every day of our beautifully dysfunctional life together, I loved him madly, more madly than before or since. Before him, I never knew what love was. I never knew it was possible to feel something so deep, so absolute, so certain. And I am eternally grateful to have learned that lesson, even if the since hasn't been so rewarding (yet).

But in the end of that naive and senseless love, inevitability marked...

The end.