#lonlienss

When I was younger and more romantic, I would slip little love notes into girlfriends’ books and DVD cases. At some point in time, I hope, they may get read. I think the last person I did that with was the ex fiancée. She had a bunch of Shakespeare, and for some reason the Twilight series. I’ve never heard back from anyone I’ve done it to.

This was the way I loved, in secret. My love hits you when you aren’t paying attention. You turn the corner and run into it on accident. You bang your pinky toe on it. Curse the air with it!

Would a love letter from the past hold any weight today? If I happened on an unread note from an old flame I would definitely get a nostalgic smile. If I were on good terms with her I would ring her up and have a laugh about it.

I never left you any hidden messages. All my love for you was spelled right out in the open, plain as punch.

You know, I lied. There is a secret love letter from you. I find it in my wallet on occasion. I forget that it’s there. It’s hidden behind the contact card for my storage space (the card has the code to get into the gate, but I have it memorized, so I never pull the card out). A clear profession of your love to me:

“[I typed the whole thing up right here and decided not to include it. It’s for you and me only. And at the moment, it’s really just for me. I will include the signature though: <3 always and forever, ALV (Kitty Cat)”

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As romantic as I was or claim to still be, I just hate it when people advertise how good their boyfriend is, or girlfriend. It irks me when my Facebook feed is clogged up with such bollocks as:

“I love it when my boyfriend does xyz!”

“My boyfriend is taking me shopping OMG”

“He brought me food <33333”

Friendly Fires hits me: “Take me back, take me back in the darkness.”

I’ll be the first to admit to being a hater at times. Not scared. As a scientist, I’m always trying to get to the roots of my own problems. I always come back to the ‘ten years ago me’ argument: that guy was a legit romantic. Now I know that isn’t a reason. But I just wonder, what happened?

The short answer: I think when a person lives long enough, if he’s lucky, he just starts to realize that life and love just isn’t like the movies. There aren’t any pretty bows to wrap shit up at the end. No fades to black; no rides into the sunset.

The only fade is your expiration. The only sunset is death.

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Some people, who used to love me, aren’t going to love me anymore (plenty of that to go around). Some friends I’ve known for years will go (and have gone) through some sort of gradual change and not be my friends anymore. I am my only constant. I’m here for the duration.

I would tell you that I was on a train, and that the train is going in a specific direction, and that you were welcome to ride along as long as you wanted, but the train was going either way. This was me trying to apply my ‘single’ person mentality to a relationship. What a retard. Derailed.

How long does pain last? The loss of it? I know there’s the rule of one half the time that you were with the person. I’ve been devastated before. Destroyed. I would say the worst was when the ex fiancée and I split. She and I had the next handful of years planned out in terms of being married and then having children. I know, I know, it’s the same crap everyone does. That American dream.

There’s a reason that shit is popular.  I don’t mind being part of the herd every so often.

But then all that was taken from me. More specifically, as she would say, I took it away from myself. And it’s true, when I really break it down. I wasn’t exhibiting behaviors of a man who was ready to dedicate his life to a marriage.

And I was hurt.

When a person is in an altered mental state, he does irrational things that he knows aren’t going to end well: Phone calls, hounding, begging, pleading. The five stages of loss bullshit. And even someone savvy like myself knows it’s happening, and still, I’m unable to resist going through it. That progression of loneliness. Falling but not falling. The loss of love is a black hole. Not even light can escape it gravity.

I know people who simply have to make it known that they’ve lost someone. Also, they compulsively reiterate that they are over said person. I’m no expert, but if you constantly have to volunteer that you are over something, clearly you aren’t. I understand that people cope in different ways.

When I see romantic comedy movies, I want to rage at the screen. It pisses me off to no end when I see the type of hoops the characters go through to win each other over.  I also want to cry. The sappy moments are really cheesy yes, but I cry because I remember that the really real world isn’t like the movies.

You and I came close. It was beautiful for a time, and happy and sad, and violent. We experienced each other in real time, unabridged, clean and filthy, loving and hating, ecstatic and abysmal. Certainly enamored, an unshakable love we had for each other. I could feel it in my balls; I could hear it in the intonation of your voice. Anything, anything was possible.

The embittered codger in me hates romance openly, but secretly I love the stuff. I’m addicted to the turning of the tides: the moment when someone goes from not being sure about me, to being hooked. The tipping point.