mental-health

Love, A Four Letter Word

Infidelity, what side of it are you on? Are you the cheater or the cheated? My best friend has been calling me and telling me how he is no longer in love with his wife. The situation is a bit of a cliche. He has fallen in love with his office mate. She’s half his age and very flirtatious.  She wears short skirts and tight blouses. When she bends over the file cabinet he swears he can see the full moon. He speaks about her as if she is an angel sent from heaven. The relationship has incrementally grown into a full blown affair. This is the stage where infatuation creates clouded choices and blind predilections. You begin to believe that you’re the first and only person who’s ever felt the adenine rush of being in love.  

He can’t stop speaking about her. “She’s sexy.” “She “gets me”.  “She’s my soulmate”. “I’ve never felt like the before”. “I’m going to marry her”. “She loves me, and I love her.” Warning, the word “love” can be a slippery slope. It’s frequently misused and means different things to different people. It’s malleable and disregards common sense. It’s a masquerade, a mirage. It’ll cause those old bones to rattle from a flood of testosterone. Before you know it, you’re ordering the old man’s drug “Viagra”. 

In the beginning you share life stories. You share dreams, aspirations and heartaches. She starts siting a little closer to you. She lets you smell her perfume. You nervously respond with grinding hugs and gentle caresses; incrementally crossing lines of appropriateness. You write one another passionate texts, sharing favorite songs, exchanging promises and intimate suggestions. You’re like a teenager discovering a fist love. The sky opens up and a choir sings. You get goose bumps just by holding her hand. The love songs on the radio seem to be composed specifically for you. 

It’s the small things that breakup a relationship. It’s the slow gnawing away of loyalty and trust. Love without trust leads to broken vows and broken hearts. You unwittingly become strangers to one another. Once you’er married the passion is consumed by the endless housekeeping tasks that need to be done. There’s no longer time for the fun things that hold a couple together. It becomes a business partnership. Everything feels like a chore. Bills need to be paid. The car needs fixed. The faucet leaks. The mortgage and home insurance are due. Sex is a routine that feels more like an obligation rather than an expression of intimacy.

Who’s gonna throw out the garbage? Who’s gonna do the laundry? Who’s in charge of the finances? Who’s gonna decide what’s for dinner? Who’s gonna do the dishes? Who’s gonna feed the dog? Everything seems to be collapsing and falling apart around you both.

The cute little chick at the office doesn’t have to share in all these boring mundane tasks. She doesn’t have to figuratively or literally scrub the stains out of your shorts. She keeps you hanging on by allowing you to play grab ass. Everything is fun and exciting. But beware, there ain’t no fool like an old fool.

Love, everyone wants to feel that way again. To feel alive and excited, to be touched and to feel the touch of another. How long should a love last? Does it have an expiration date?. In time, all those little annoyances accumulate into an excruciating sense of resentment. The romance is siphoned off as the hard-work of trying to remain in love with someone becomes fatiguing.

In time, your perfect lover no longer seems so perfect. They’re petty, selfish and predictable just like the rest of us. They’ll roll over and fart, they’ll wake up with bad breath, they make weird faces when having sex, their opinions are stupid, they dress like a slob on weekends, they no longer look at you with that look of excitement. The fuel of love sputters and evaporates. It feels more like a trap and less like a dream come true.

Just as it’s the little things that break up a relationship, it’s also true that it’s the little things that keep a relationship alive. As the saying goes, “love is a verb” it requires action. It’s wrapped up in all the little boring gestures like patience, forgiveness, understanding, listening, being heard and sharing in all the victories and loses that this life will dish out. 

There’s no counseling or magic drug that will resurrect a dyeing love. In the end, it’s up to you to decide if it’s worth it. Is it worth fighting for, or is it a lost cause?

In spite of the hazards, we still choose to fall in love. We dive in heart first into a lake of fire. In this crazy life we all crave intimacy over complacency. We all want to feel immaculate, sexy and valued by our partner. But we’re only human, with all of our flaws, faults and blemishes. It’s a package deal, you have to take the good with the bad, because that’s the way it is. Introspectively you ask yourself, does the good outweigh the bad? Are you expecting too much, or too little out of love?

In the end, love is having fun with someone, it’s that simple. It’s spending time with someone who make you laugh, who make you feel alive, who make you feel like you matter. Settle for nothing less.

I’ll leave you with a riddle.

You know why they call it love?

Because all the other four letter words are already taken.

God Sex and Love

God, Sex and Love

I’m sitting here alone in my room after dark, with only one standing lamp giving off a sunday evening glow.  If you were here and the night became still, I’d have you tell me stories about your childhood.  Your soft warm voice would put my worrisome mind at ease.  I want to know you better, and to have you trust me like old friends do.  Its so strange, I feel as if I’ve always known you, perhaps it was in a different time or place—or maybe a thousand lifetimes ago, your face is so familiar, like those in my dusty old photo-album that stare out at me from yellowed snapshots, leaving me with that sad aching feeling deep inside my chest, a mourning for days lost and moments that have placidly slipped by, unnoticed except for my thread-worn memories and aging keepsakes.  At times the past feels as if it just occurred yesterday and then at other times, it feels like all these random events belong to another person from a different lifetime, do you know what I mean?——Maybe we once wandered down dark rainy streets of some unremarkable small town in the midwest, surrounded by an ocean of corn fields—ducking into smokey old taverns with the jukebox playing the likes of Merle Haggard, pool-balls cracking and the local yahoos giving us that familiar glare that says, “What the fuck are you two outcasts doing in here?”—-do you think this is possible?  I do—but I’m a poet and a dreamer and such dubious notions occur to me all the time——-maybe you don’t know what I am trying to say and perhaps you never will—-but for now, we can share our stories and see where they leads us.

I imagine you cooking us supper, preparing it with those immaculate small hands of yours; hands connected to your arms and then to your body and finally to a heart beating deep inside of you.  And I can see you smiling as you go about adding this and that to your unwritten recipe. Evening closes in and the kitchen is filled with that comforting aroma of seasoned dishes simmering on the stove, it smells like home.  It’s no big deal to you, but as for me, I’m enjoying the tenderness that comes with being fussed over.  I don’t know how you do these things, mixing all those mysterious spices and ingredients together, but I believe that sharing food is an act of love—

I watch you move thru space with an effortless grace; with athleticism and agility—oppressive gravity is envious of your dancers finesse. Unlike me, I trip over my own untied shoelaces. I dance like I cook—horribly.  I lumber, I lurch, and then stumble——as I trample across the crumbling ground of my faltering days.  My refuge has always been found in the eloquence of words, even on those darkest of nights when sleep eludes me, I am able to blend them silently together inside my frenzied head like watercolors that beautifully bleed and melt into one another.  The sharing of words is also an act of love. It’s really all I’ve ever had to offer anyone.

I remember on a whim you and I headed up north on highway 1.   The road traced along the rocky coastline, and everything was as it should be, with you sitting in the passenger seat smiling as the radio played the song Hero. Across bridges and up hill and dale we carried on as the rain fell on our windshield making the world appear blurry and dreamlike.  Back then, we had no plans or outside distractions, we were sorting out this thing called life in real-time—-no past, no future, just you and I naively melding into one—and so it went—so on and so forth….forever and a day….and for the time being, that was good enough. 

We holed up in a dumpy sea weathered motel and drank cheap wine, ate cheese with sour dough-bread and made love. Outside the world was dreary and gray with a damp fog blowing in off the sea.  We had nothing to do or nowhere to go, so we drank more wine and shared our secrets about God, sex and love.  We took walks on the windy beach until we were soaked and tired and then we went back to our musty old hotel room to talk.  I lit a candle and we stared at our shadows on the wall as the the flame flickered, we shared our thoughts in hushed voices, quietly falling in love, with the divine surprise of stone being sculpted into art.

I don’t remember if it was my eighth beer or my eleventh, but somewhere along that point, I’d lost the ability to self-edit.  Who can say if it was intellect or emotion that was guiding me down a one way street,  in the wrong direction, no breaks, no pulling back——just me blindly headed straight at you.  Fuck-it, all that sober talk was getting us nowhere, I was either gonna have you, or piss you off so bad that you’d never speak to me again—I’d rather have it that way then some middle of the road, getting nowhere banal discussions about the weather.     I prefer the more unconventional conversations.