I fell in love.

Before I start this, let us be clear.  I was born an idealist.  Not some, I am trying to be cool idealist; I literally have no choice in the matter.  I am as high minded as they come.  I have the gift of single mindedness.  If you ask any friend of mine to name dominant characteristics of my personality this will be one they all agree on; I do not ever lose focus on the thing I am focused on.  If I am in love I think of nothing else.  Many people find this very unnerving.   Nothing matters as much as love.  Nothing.  I’m not talking about some silly love either.  None of that, love is this, and love is that; opinions matter not.   This love I speak of is not some romantic crap that immature girls dream up.  I don't wish to possess or control or nothing.  I just want to love and be loved, pure and simple.  If you hear me say I love someone, it is a wholehearted no questions asked kind of thing.  It is not temporary.  It is not fleeting or whimsical.  It is as real as it can get.  If I say I love someone, it is for life. 

This gave me writers block.  It stopped me dead in my tracks.  When I got to the part of the story where I fell in love; no words would come to me.  The desire to write left me as quickly as it came.  Then one day I read something and a few days later a friend said something and here I am writing.  Ernest Hemingway said, "Write drunk; edit sober."  This woke me up a bit.  I've read some of his biographical writing, so I know we share some things in common.  My friend said, "Write it, but don't put it on the internet."  That is sound advice, but don't put it on the internet?  Now I know the truth; I was just being afraid.  My fear shut down my creativity.  My fear shut down my writing. 

To be in love is the most vulnerable thing I know of.  Just talking about it in these simple terms makes me very anxious.  To be an idealist in love is dangerous.  Suicidal even.  It is no ordinary love.  If I speak of love I bear my soul.  It is dangerous indeed in this world to bear one's soul.  I can bear heart break now.  I am much older and wiser.  The fifteen year old me though, would not have survived a true heart break.  Even now I cannot imagine what would have happened had she broke my heart.  I nearly went mad when I got dumped after prom the year before and I did not love that girl.  Even I could not fathom what I would have done had this girl betrayed me too.  Dangerous times for a young Benjamin.

At fifteen I was getting exactly what I was praying for; the perfect girl for me.  As you will see later in my life, learning this fact was an emotional face plant.  A stab in the chest?  More like a repeated twist of the knife.  In my defense I was only fifteen years old.  Raised as I was how could I have possibly known?  How could I possibly have known that she really was a girl for me?  Pure intentions had the girl of my dreams right before my eyes, but because of my ignorance I could not see reality.

She was beautiful.  Correction.  She is beautiful.  But since I am writing about then, maybe it is okay to say, she was beautiful. 

This is part of what locks me up.  It is not was.  She was not anything, she still is.   She is.   These things are timeless.   If you know how to do it, if you know how to find your matches in life, they transcend time.  My girlfriend now, she will always be a match for me, no matter what, regardless of environmental circumstance.  Every woman I have loved, I still love, and will always love.  It was not my choice to love them.   I did not plan it.   It just is.   We mesh and that is all there is to it.  You can break it down all you want, explain it, rationalize it, whatever you want.  At the end of the day it is what it is.   Someone could say this or that, but it will not matter what anyone says, when we are near each other, it feels right.   Our connectivity, our bond, transcends culture and time.  It is deeper than us, beyond us, but not limited to us.  That is to say, there is not only one person that one can connect with.  My heart is too big to love only one.

The truth is she does not know how I feel.  None of them do.  I don't talk about it.  So by writing this I am bearing a little bit of my soul.  Who is not afraid when they do that?  I fear most, that even after attempting to explain it, they will not understand.  I am powerless in this regard.  Who does not fear being powerless?

I've never felt so guilty about anything in my life, but I just couldn’t believe it was true.   I couldn’t.   I was afraid for my life.   I just could not believe that she actually liked me.   I mean, my own mother didn't love me, how could this girl possibly, actually, love me?  I really had trouble even believing that she was dating me.  I was jealous and insecure.   I kept waiting for the cruel joke to be exposed.  I'm not joking.  I really kept waiting for everyone to make fun of me for actually thinking that this girl liked me.  I kept waiting to show up at school where everyone was laughing at me because I was stupid enough to think this girl was my girlfriend.  How could this beautiful, intelligent, amazing girl love me?   Even my brother was in awe that I was dating this girl. 

In reality she knew nothing of my childhood.  We have talked as adults and she still does not understand or really even know about it.  From her perspective she had no idea what was going on.  She was being just like me and just simply seeing me for what I was and not what the world had made me.  She didn’t see a boy whose mother never loved him.  To her I was a boy at school she liked.  All my dysfunction was a brand on my forehead that only I could see and feel.  Like looking through a key hole, she could only see a tiny part of me.

My psyche could not handle it.  It was too good to be true.  I knew if she betrayed me, and she would, that I would not be able to handle it, so I did it for her.  Does that make sense?  I mean, I was only fifteen.  I cheated on her so that when she cheated on me it would not be devastating.  Plain and simple.   I loved her so much I could not bear her hurting me, so I hurt her first.  I had to do it.  You see this way, when she hurts me, I will deserve it, and thus be free of once again not measuring up.   You see, I can handle it if I deserve it.  I would have killed myself had I not, and we all know that no girl would be faithful to me, so I had to be first.  Otherwise I would have had to die.  I would have died.  I nearly died anyways.  I wanted to be loved so badly it was maddening.  I was already telling people I would not live to be thirty.

This was the first time in my life where it became clear to me just how badly my mother fucked me up.  Not that I actually grasped what she had done to me, but that I could tell that she did something to me that fucked me up.  Things were just beginning to peak through to my mind that I was different than everyone else.  I knew this because when I talked about love no one understood what I was talking about.   I learned to keep it to myself.  All I wanted was for a female to love me.  It was consuming.  I wanted nothing else.  I knew then that my mother robbed me of something that could never be returned.  I couldn't voice it, but it was there all the same.

Trust me.  I see it now.  All too clear.

I had a soul mate in my proximity and I smashed her heart.  The thing I wanted more than anything was right in front of me and I smashed it into a million pieces.  Such things cannot be put back together again. 

My writers block will not let me write about those magical moments we shared.  Those are mine and hers and no one else's.   Know that I loved her.  Always have and always will.  She impacted my life in such a way that I will remember it until I die.  I do not have many regrets, but this is one of them.