Love

For the longest stretch in my life, I believed it a dream obtainable to everyone but myself. It would exist in art, in friendships, family, and partnerships all beyond my grasp.

Then in the most unexpected ways, I experienced it myself.

To have had experienced it so profoundly at key points in my life, I consider myself lucky.

The unexpected decade long friends who became family, showed me how I love. How I am the linchpin and organizer. To have been able to show a large group of people they were loved by simply being myself... How wonderful for them to have experienced what it was to be loved by me. Even though all of us have parted ways now, and navigating life without them was impossible at first, I am grateful and forever changed for having loved them all.

Then he came along. To have been loved wholeheartedly for who I am, was nothing short of special. Every worry, every concern, over turned. Energy and reciprocity always matched. I was shown I was allowed to take up space, to be weird, to simply exist and I’d still be loved. To have received a type of love I craved and knew I was deserving of, was healing indeed. Even with all the strife and if it ultimately did not end well, it was still worth it.

Yet it is the now continued absence of love in my life, romantic sure but especially platonic, that turned me into someone I don’t recognize. Finding my way back to her is a journey I am still stumbling through. 

Knowing it is out there, even in parts, but knowing it is rarer still to find it again.

As much love as I have learned to give myself I have realized while that may be a beautiful thing, it is not enough of anything. It doesn’t hold substance like the others. To have enough to sustain oneself is well. To have an abundance and fewer channels to funnel it to however, is living a half life.

I often wonder if it will return to me.

It’s out there…everywhere....

Yet once again, it’s became the shiny prize beyond my reach.

I know I may spend the rest of my days seeking it.

However precarious the lines may blur between the search driving me to madness or the search driving me to fulfillment becomes, it will still be a path I choose to travel on. A path I must travel on.

I guess in all things, even this, there is a balance. You may have it sometimes but perhaps not all the time.

And to have had it at all, well...