On Love

Sometimes I think about how I've lost a lot of the things I loved. Sometimes people leave, whether they die or move on or sabotage a good thing. Perhaps I've driven them away, who knows? I don't think that I did, but you'd have to ask them how they perceived it. We all love in our own realities.

We lost other things along the way, too. We are fickle, we humans. Music or movies or books or TV shows we love can one day lose their luster. Material things breakdown or we lost interest. We grow, we change, and one day something doesn't hit us the way it once did, or some new song or movie connects with us on a deeper level. Something doesn't go with the new decor, so even though we don't have the heart to throw it away, we put it in the attic or the back of a closet, or hang it in the back room where we rarely see it anymore. We still have a fond place in our heart for them, but we've moved on.

Our heroes die or let us down, our artists follow their muse and we complain that they aren't as good as they were, and people just keep on being people, changing in their own ways, just as we do. Love is shuttling in and out of their lives too.

Then I find myself wondering if some of the things I loved were ever real. Maybe people were lying to me, and themselves. Maybe I fell for a slick marketing campaign and focus group research. Perhaps it was an impulse buy. Maybe I was trying to appease my peers, or family, and I talked myself into liking something that never really touched me. We are good at masking our motives, especially to ourselves.

I wonder how many things I've loved only because I needed to love someone or something at that moment. It happens. We are equally good at getting what we need and not even admitting that we needed it, or what our motives were.

We go on, careening our way through life, confusing love for a million other things, and giving it short shrift when we find it at times because we've cheapened it so much. There are times we lie in bed at night, sometimes next to the person we've tied our lives, our hopes and dreams to, and wonder if anyone ever really loved us at all.

Love takes on many forms, and has to run a gauntlet every day to survive, and at the end of the day most of us are lucky to have it in any capacity. So if you love somebody, or more importantly, someone loves you, cherish that now. Love is elusive and objective and it changes so much on both sides that it's a miracle we can muster up the courage to love at all.

We are brave, even when we don't realize it, and we are so much stronger and impressive than we think, but that's a conversation for a different day.

Today is just about love.