To strip Love

Love is never lost they say, I wondered about that. Love never dies is another cliche used, but is it true?

When I was thirteen I fell in love with someone, head over heels and totally. Puppy love they would call it, but for me it was so much more than a mere infatuation. It was no doubt the deepest love I had ever felt up to that point.

I went back to that love today to test the premises mentioned above.

Although the feelings I then called love were real, the object of my love was not. The image I loved was a character on the TV. The love I felt for this character grew with every weekly episode and so did the flock of butterflies in my stomach. It fueled my fabricated belief that somehow he could be real. During the week I had conversations with him inside my head and I clung to the feeling of safety those conversations gave me.

I don’t have to watch the reruns of the series to visit that overwhelming feeling that the flock of butterflies caused, it is right here, right now. I can stand right in the midst of this cloud of colored wings or choose watch them dance from a distance.

Watching from a distance I can see clearly that not all butterflies are love, some of them are a different colored feeling all together.

There is the butterfly of hope for instance, hope of something better than this prepubescent life.

There is the butterfly to cure of the indescribable loneliness I felt at that time; at least now, in my head, I belonged somewhere with someone and that someone did not think me strange. A someone that would listen to my point of view and ask the right questions. In my head I did not get ignored by the someone that I loved so deeply.

Then there was the butterfly that gave me the illusion of safety, it gave room to spread my wings with fearlessness and be free. The folly of reassurances that when push would come to shove I would be saved by this picture perfect person, but push never came to shove enough to find his car in front of our house and me being whisked away. The illusion did however give me enough strength and stability to face what even injustice I thought I saw.

There also was fairness and the wings of rebellion I felt justifiable righteous in when at night, just before I went to sleep, I told of my day to the poster on the wall. The voice that came from my illustrious love went far beyond the words given to him by writers unknown. He would stroke my hair when I told of my intentions to do right but how it fell apart anyway, and in his eyes I could see pain and sadness when I told of the “right” I did for all the wrong reasons.

I so desperately longed to feel save in his arms and to do right in his eyes that it guided me through the formative years of my life and it made me find my rebellions feet in relative safety.

I knew that it was all an act and that my hero an illusion but even so I clung to it with all my might. I never tough saw the need or understood the need of others to scrutinize the private live of the actor who gave form to my hero, to me act and actor were never the same. It is only in the reruns I realize that you can only play the reality of deep friendship when you have know the reality of such deep friendship and the actor must play a deeper part in the act than I then thought.

But still, it is in my never aging, never changing hero that I had rested my hopes upon and I had him scrutinized my private live. This cocoon of feelings and illusions made me feel save and they helped me grow.

And now when I strip the butterflies of hope and sense of security away from the love, shed the wings of righteousness and I found a place for the revelations of my rebellion, I see the love for what It really was and always will be; an un measurable and unwavering source of energy that is there for all to dip into.

When I strip this love away from the illusion it is not love for the act or the actor, nor is it the love for where or who I once was or where it has brought me. It is the energy of love that fed me then and feeds me now, it is love that stroked my hair and it was the lack of love that I saw as pain in his eyes.

Love has no form but it will take any, it has no purpose, it is the purpose. Love gives no safety but it is safety, it has no hope to give but it is full of hope. Love is not mine to give, but it is given to me freely. It was undying then as it is now and it is never lost but always right here to be found and it is yours for the taking.