I have been writing about the past for a while, trying to sum up some things and reflect, but now I think I will write about the present.
I am lonely, but at the same time I am busy. I feel that I have a lot of love in my heart, and every day it stays there and seems to have no place to go. Don’t get me wrong. I love my friends and they make me happy when we are together. But when I am alone… I FEEL very alone. I try to keep myself busy at all times, working, taking pictures, setting up photo shoots, hanging out with my friends, both old and new. My latest project is a mixed media piece for an art show in August and some movie/film-inspired photo shoots. When I’m working I feel good. I cleaned my house and moved from the master bedroom to a smaller bedroom. I have meetings this week. I just got my new website up and running.
All of these things are reasons to be happy. My past is a reason to be happy! Though it’s marred with some unfortunate events, it has been interesting, and the bad times have helped to intensify the good times. The good times were GREAT. It has been a pleasure to relive the past and think about my life.
But sometimes, during moments when my mind has time to wander, I come back to my loneliness and yearning. I want to run away from it, escape it, and I think of all the places I could go. New York, San Francisco, I’ve even thought of France or going back to Ecuador. This empty feeling couldn’t possibly persist in France, right? Well, I know better than that. It is childish of me to think that the feeling that I have right now would disappear, the feeling that there is something missing from deep inside of me, the feeling that I am just on the edge of a precipice and that the smallest breeze would take me down into the deep abyss, that feeling exists in France and New York and San Francisco too. That feeling exists wherever there is humanity. We just have to learn to deal with it.
So many people have written about love. Just in the past two hours I’ve read numerous stories, love letters, poetry, blogs on love, love, love, love! It is sickening. It makes my entire body hurt, because I want to write beautiful things about love, but I feel nothing but pain when I think about it. It becomes hard to swallow. It burns my eyes. I have trouble breathing.
I am going to try anyway…
It was like someone took the happiness that I felt in life, the happiness of being me, living my own life and owning it, being independent, feeling free and beautiful and creative, it was like someone took that and MAGNIFIED it, made it exponentially better, as if life COULD get any better. I was so happy before, and then… it just got better. I didn’t think it could get any better than that. But it did. I was so happy I stopped sleeping. I went to bed at 5 am and woke up at 8 am. I didn’t feel tired. Everything I did was enjoyable, even something so simple as eating ice cream at 11 pm. My skin glowed and I felt beautiful. I loved looking in the mirror, because I saw what he loved and I loved it too. I loved myself more than I had ever done in my entire life, because he loved me that much. I was on top of the world, nothing could touch me. I laughed so much. I laughed all the time and my smile was unstoppable. I wanted to create, I was so inspired – poetry, photography, even sketching and painting, which I hadn’t done in years. All these things poured out of me. I had this twitch in my stomach when he walked into the room or when I heard his name. I was soaring and didn’t think of the future or the past, just the present. Just love. I thought of how exciting my life seemed, all the excitement that this feeling bestowed upon everything, even laying in bed and watching a movie and laughing until the wee hours of the morning or laying in my tiny room reading poetry while he played the guitar. We spent so many wonderful hours in that tiny room, that tiny universe that seemed so complete. Suddenly all the incredible things I had done and places I had been and people I had met, became mere trivialities in the face of such ecstasy. I thought of Ecuador and France and London and Portugal and Costa Rica, and all the many places I had lived, traveled and experienced. And they were beautiful, but small, distant, and all I could think about was the love I felt and how I never wanted this to end, how I could go on in this little city of St. Petersburg, FL, and live here forever and just feel like this eternally. ME! The traveler, the adventurer, the vagabond. This passion gave me roots! I had never felt like this before, it just hit me and I accepted it and gave back all that I could. It was so easy to give when I felt so blissful. I would have given anything, everything. I did give all I had. I would continue to give everything. To see the morning light pour over someone’s face and have that one simple vision be your entire world. To wake up in the morning and gaze at a sleeping face that is a work of art, inimitable and almost unreal. You have to pinch yourself to make sure you are real in that moment, to make sure that what you feel is true and that you are not still sleeping, dreaming in a world that will never be. I felt so healthy and vibrant, I felt like a child! Even when I was a child things didn’t seem so simple. And that was just it! It was so powerful and overwhelming that it conversely became simple, because something so total, so consuming is, by definition, simple. Unarguable. Undeniable. No gray area. Just pure happiness. Sometimes happiness so intense that tears well up in your eyes. And I didn’t question it. Just let it wash over me and cleanse me. I was whole and full and content. So simple.
To me, that is love. It is real. I lived it. No speculation, just truth. I am not writing about something that eludes me, that seems unreachable and intangible and ethereal. I have FELT ethereal. I am not taking what others have said and felt and applying them to my life, because I don’t need them. I understand love and what it feels like. The above is a documentation of facts, and though they may sound poetic, those words are nothing more than a factual account of a real love that consumes my entire being. There is nothing quite like it. Never in my life could I have imagined it. Neither can you, unless you’ve been there. So many people want it, search for it, ache for it, but it can only come to you when you feel complete in yourself. It comes to you just when you feel that life couldn’t get any better. Then love happens, and you realize the truth of all the poetry, all the heart-wrenching love letters and music and stories, you feel it all and you know that it exists and that it wasn’t just someone being creative and romantic, but someone being honest.