Inside an old heart

"Did you love her?"

Yes.

"What was it about her that you loved?"

I don't know. It was a "feeling." Not a feeling I get easily. Not a feeling I feel from many women. Yet, when I feel it, I know it and I knew I loved her deeply.

"And this was years ago?"

Yes. Years. A dozen months or hundreds of days. Time doesn't seem to matter when one talks about love. Love stands outside of time. It just sits there patiently in your heart either waiting for you to take action or waiting for you to invoke memories of your inactions. It sits quietly at the seat of your soul.

"So when you think of her today, how does it make you feel inside?"

I feel that love. I can remember the feelings it invoked inside of me. I can remember the first time we held hands -- the first time we kissed. I can remember how that love felt -- the mystery of what would happen next wrapped within the memories of what we shared that previous day. Love had a way of fucking with time -- one hour with her would seem like only a second, yet just minutes of waiting to see her would feel like days of torment. That's how love can fuck with time. When you are at your happiest and with her, it goes all too quickly. Yet when you are apart and waiting to see her next, it feels like an eternity stretched even further.

"Perhaps that is one way to immortality?"

Yes, exactly. Find a way to leave yourself waiting for her forever and time will come to a complete halt. You will, in essence, have found the secret to immortality.

"And when she never comes?"

That's the thing. That's how time seeks revenge for love fucking with it. That's how time then fucks with love. When she's no longer there -- or when she no longer loves you but you still care and love her ... that's time's way of fucking with you eternally. Unrequited love is sickening. It leaves a man forever naked in the depths of his most precious passions. It leaves him crying on the inside while society forces his to posture himself in a stoic fashion on the outside. Yet, all the while, he is thinking of her and missing her.

"Well, they say it is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all."

Yes, but on the opposite side of that expression is something far more distressing. It is worse for her to have loved you at one point and then ceased loving you than for her to never have loved you at all.

"What do you mean?"

If she had never loved him, then it would be far easier to reconcile the old memories of wanting her -- of needing to be with her. But much scarier still is the possession of memories of when she did love you and when she did care about you only to face the present and find yourself in a time where she no longer thinks or cares about you. Then you find yourself living in the past and that's a dangerous thing to do.

"You should never live in the past. There is always a tomorrow -- a future."

Yeah, but on a more philisophical level, everything comes to past. Everyone at some point will find themselves on their death bed reliving the most important ... the most precious parts of their lives and wondering what it all meant. The first time they were left alone from their parents. I remember that. I remember nursery school and my mom letting go of my hand and walking away. My entire life, I was near my mother and she would come to me if I cried. Yet that day, I remember quite vividly -- she took me to my first day of school and let go of my hand and said, "I'll see you in a few hours, honey!"

I didn't believe her. I was too young to understand. To a kid, once someone you love leaves your field of view, they're as good as gone. So there I was -- alone. I was alone with a bunch of strangers and this strange adult came up to me. His name was Mr. Leo and I didn't know who this guy was. He held my hand and tried to convince me that I would be alright -- but I cried. I screamed out, "MOMMY!" I didn't want to be left alone. I was scared and felt abandoned. Once my mom crossed the threshold of the doorway and I could no longer see her, I became hysterical. Mr. Leo took me over to a large fishtank and I watched fish swimming while crying my eyes out for over an hour.

"What does this have to do with love?"

Because man, when you love a woman, there is that sense of baring it all to her. You invite her into your life and at some point, you stop being a cocky prick type of guy and you expose your true emotions to her. You show her everything and bare it all and if she decides to stick around -- that's true love. That's the most beautiful thing on Earth -- to be able to find someone out there who will find shit stains on your underwear and not get grossed out about it -- metaphorically speaking of course. Someone who accepts you for who you are and chooses to be with you because they love YOU and not some image of a guy they think they'd want to love. That's beautiful.

"And if they leave?"

I felt like that day when I was three years old and my mom had left me. I felt abandoned, alone and scared. Breaking up is an extremely hard thing to do because it is like losing a piece of your family and a piece of your heart. It's one thing when you go up to a female and ask her out and she says no. That's not really personal -- that's rejection, but it doesn't really hurt. But to give your life, heart and soul to a woman and for her to know your deepest fears and silliest habits and then one day she leaves? That's personal -- that hurts. It's like being three again and watching my mom leave thinking she'll never come back.


"Yeah, but there is always future possibilities -- new loves, new people, new adventures."

Exactly. But at some point you realize you're giving a piece of your heart and soul to every woman that comes into your life. How many pieces total can I give out? Then you have to realize that it becomes a little bit harder to bare it all with the next woman because you know the pain of breaking-up and how much it stings -- it really fucking stings. Your heart learns to be a bit more defensive with each new love -- yet that's fucking stupid because you never know at what point you will meet the woman who will be with you your entire life.

"You can't give up on love ever."

No, you can't. But at the same time, the older you get the more memories you have of women who did mean something to you at some point in your life. And no matter what happens, there is always a piece of you that is thinking of them and a piece of you that still loves them -- or at least loves some earlier memory of them. The heart gets filled up with all these memories of experiences you had with them. There are some memories that are too precious to put into words. Each lover has that one memory that you'll always cherish. It is carved in stone for eternity -- or at least until you die. But there it is, locked deep inside your heart occasionally surfacing when you read a particular story or smell a certain scent.

Love never really dies. People come and go within relationships but that love they share? It never really dies. Love is a lot like water. You can't destory water. You can seperate it -- but there is always an ocean of it out there somewhere waiting for you to dive in and experience more. You'll swim and swim and love it but at some point you have to come out of the pool on a cold day and you're left shaking from the cold -- you know you love to swim, but you realize at some point you'll have to leave the pool and then you'll start shaking. What's the best cure to end the coldness -- to end the shaking? To jump back in the pool -- to stay in the pool forever and never leave it.

That's what love is all about. Finding someone to swim with forever.