Perhaps I am greedy with my demands,
but I do not want a Valentine’s Day love that is as flat and
two-dimensional as a Hallmark card. I do not require the pretty words of
others to know what love is. Love is everyday, it comes unbidden,
little things, surprises wrapped like gifts when you expect nothing. I
made you a pot of coffee. I left you a towel.
I do not seek cut flowers that will soon
wither and die but rather moments of silence together, puppy love, the
sweetness of just holding hands, wrapped in secret memories of long dead
crushes. A red balloon snatched from a car lot. A snickers bar. Your
treasured dead earth worm covered in fuzz from your pocket. It’s not the
gifts I seek, but the intentions of your heart when you handed them to
me.
I do not want a box of candy, instead I wish to bite through that hard chocolate crust and reach the soft gooey center, the very truffle of your soul.
How cheap Valentine’s Day is, how
unsatisfying, how it leaves you hungry and aching for something more,
almost as if you wished you had never caught a glimpse of it in the
first place.
This year we are gifted with the shallow, broken soul of Christian Grey and yet another empty-headed twit, not unlike Bella with all her vampire longing and childish love angst. Is this all we are as men and women? Can we not see our higher selves even in our dreams, our fiction, our fantasies?
Christian Grey is boring, as is
Anastasia. The world is chock full of broken men and shattered women,
completely oblivious to the nature of their own selves, acting and
reacting to each other in this rather macabre dance, trying so
desperately to seek some meaning in it all. But you have not because you ask not….
People want so badly to believe in fairy
tales, as if two pieces of brokennness and wounding can fit together and
figure out how to have a happily ever after. We do not wish to have to
change the nature of ourselves, but instead to change the very nature of
the world around us, so abuse becomes love and poorly written dialog
passes for heady conversation. Unedited drivel becomes great literature.
Gee, I sure wish I had somebody to
watch over me, somebody to guide me, somebody to track my every move,
somebody omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient…
That really is a fairytale kind of love,
if you read the fairy tales of old, the ones that end with the little
match girl freezing to death in the snow or the red shoes chopping off
her feet so her legs will stop dancing. In the real world there are a
thousand Christian Greys, many Anastasias, and their story always ends
in tragedy, their love consummated with a bottle of pills in a bathtub
or grey matter splattered on the wall of a lonely motel somewhere.
It breaks my heart to watch people pour
things into the abyss of their soul, over and over again, as if we can
just dump enough stuff down there to cover up all the emptiness and
longing and desire, the unbearable ache for something more. Such
unpopular words these days, but seek ye first the kingdom..
There’s a reason these “love” stories are
sold to young girls, because if you are older and have experienced the
world, been blessed to have felt the nature of true love, you will
accept no substitutions. You are not easily deceived by cheap
imitations. You do not look at a wounded, broken men and see Prince
Charming. You are not the least bit enchanted by the mesmerizing gaze of
the undead. Your love is greedy, bottomless, and it demands depth and
authenticity.
I do not really blame the men who seek
power and control. A rather desperate act of self-defense I imagine,
because the very nature of love demands you allow somebody to peer into
your soul, to consume the soft nouget that resides there, to drain you
of all your life energy, not unlike a vampire, drinking in all that you
are. In the end you will wither and die, having given up all that you
have to offer.
That’s true love for you. A rather
symbiotic and parasitical thing, as ugly as intestinal worms or as
beautiful as a wild orchid clinging to a bit of rotted log on the forest
floor.
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