July 24th, 2008

You and I aren’t the same people we were when we fell in love.

And how could we be? We were so young and so fearful of what would become of our feelings for each other. We guarded ourselves behind gossamer veils of pretension that meant so little when it came to embracing passion. Giving in to the newness, wanting to make first contact and wanting to freeze every moment in time, forever. How do you hang on to that? And can you, or should you rather? That isn’t a place for permanent residence because other things clamor for attention, like trust and security. But that sense of protection can come quickly, either by choice or by happenstance. And with the latter, you are thankful that you have met your soul mate, lucky that you can stop looking, or better, you have found each other. You hold each other and you can almost see it all laid out before you, as if the future is playing out and someone else is playing the part, someone so much better versed in the script and dialogue. When you embrace you can’t see into that person’s eyes, instead you are looking past them– ironic, because you have never felt closer and there is no where you would rather be. The dark, starless night is bitter cold, dense with lost time and you never want to leave that place, or that memory behind because it is who you are wanting to be and who you remember wanting to be.

Who is with you now? Do you remember the hesitation as you picked up the phone and remembered a lifetime as he spoke those words to you? Trembling inside because the loneliness was washing away, the pain was fleeting. And when he left you after that first reunion, you didn’t touch the ground for weeks, for months, not even now. The coy smiles, the bright eyes, the electric touch of two people finding that connection between heaven and earth and each other. It is the giving in completely to fate, the stripping down to the bone, the unmasking… that is what will let love in. It can’t be scary, it will be blind, or at the very least like searching around in the dark shadows cast by moonlight. It will lead to the brilliant dawn, the cold still bites at your naked body, but the sun will warm you and keep you close, as two hearts now beat as one.

We aren’t the same people we were when we fell in love, but that love is better now, stronger because we made it through the shadows into the light. The expectations of what this love was going to be built from the ground up, deeply rooted in trust and understanding, is something greater now. It isn’t complete yet, and in time it will grow higher towards the sun, and its roots will expand ever deeper into the ground. And the stars start to show through the night’s cover because love is ever changing, always constant and forever. You cannot go back to the person you were when you first fell in love, and why would you want to? You would lose forever the growing, the learning, the memories of an awkward and fledgling romance turned true love. Don’t look to turn back the memories of love, instead look to what you could become, chances are it will become more than you ever dreamed it could.