Fallin in Freakin Love

It's really no surprise I fell in love as hard as I did. Or at least I'm realizing that now. I've had a flair for the dramatic and a desperate need for attention for as long as I can remember. My dad having an affair and leaving our family was the perfect little cherry on top. That solidified my dramatic tendencies. And it increased my need for attention and love, of course. #daddyissues. I loved love. Still do. And I love hard. I love people who have most likely forgotten about me. I probably love you. I thought I had been in love before, until I met him. My sweet guy.

I fell in love in Hawaii. I know, I'm rolling my eyes too. I never realized how dreamy my life was back then until I was describing it out loud to my therapist. I thought the feeling of floating for 3 months was because I was in love. Honestly I'm still not sure which had a bigger factor. Love or Hawaii. I think he'd say it was both. We couldn't have one without the other. Loving him was like my favorite thing to do. It was all I wanted to do. And it's all I did do for a while in the beginning. We moved in together after making our relationship official on Cinco de Mayo, on a cliff, on acid. The jump to living together wasn't that big since I had been spending every night in his room for two weeks. Storing my suitcase in his living room, inching my way in and slowly pushing his best friend/ roommate out the door. I had no plan when I left the farm I was staying at for free (in exchange for work) to move 100 miles up the island. I just knew I wanted to leave and I knew I needed to be closer to him. The first month we lived together I did pretty much nothing but be in love with him. And cook, and clean, and get high, and walk a mile to the local thrift store to get $1 plates and $3 bikinis. I was the housewife I always wanted to be. Well, like the hippie version of the housewife I always wanted to be. My world revolved around him, and as anti-feminist as this may sound, I didn't and still don't have a problem with that. To a certain extent. To love and to be loved is such an otherworldly gift. I think it needs and deserves to be explored and to be experienced wholly, unapologetically, without fear, without bounds. And so I did.

I was so in love and I can't even say when I knew it because it just became the most evident thing in the world. It was like I had no memory of not being in love with him. The first time I told him, I told him with my eyes. I know, *gag* We were laying in bed looking into each other's eyes and smiling, like we always did, and I told him there was something I wanted to tell him but I couldn't. I knew it was too soon but I also had no doubt in my mind that it was love and not something else. Love was all over my face, shooting out of my finger tips, on the cusp of everything I said, but I didn't actually say the words "I love you" until about a week later. A week after the eyes incident. And he told me he loved me a couple days after that, and then regretted it, and then said it a couple days later when he really meant it. And that was no problem at all. The idea of him not loving me back didn't cause me any grief. Not because I knew he loved me, or even that I knew he would love me eventually, but I was just so happy that I loved him. It was the best. It was more than enough. But being loved by him was also dope as hell.

When I got back home, after leaving Hawaii, and then leaving California, all my friends were genuinely surprised that I came back. Like for real. All my friends. They were sure that I was going to stay in Hawaii, marry this beautiful bearded man, have the Ralph Lauren catalog mixed babies I had always dreamed of having, and never come back. As surprised as I was to hear this it also made complete sense because that's everything I've ever said I wanted to have. This guy was simultaneously perfect for me and all wrong for me. In the storybook version of my life. Which straddles the line between my lofty life goals, and the lives of fictional characters like Carrie Bradshaw and Angelina Jolie. Many times throughout our relationship, especially towards the end, I wondered whether I loved him or whether I loved the him shaped space he occupied in my life. And then I also wondered if I wanted to break up with him because he wasn't quite perfect enough, because he lacked some of my expectations for a partner in life. Sometimes he didn't seem very supportive of my writing or didn't seem to care about passions close to my heart. I wondered if he loved me or if he loved the me shaped space I occupied in his life. Which was a problem I had just had with a guy who I learned (the hard way of course) was more infatuated with an idea of me than actually me. He loved the cool girl aesthetic I guess I can convince people is the real me, or rather the entirety of me. Because it's not that I'm not that edgy artist he thought I was, but that isn't all of me. And he wasn't interested in all of me. And I struggle with whether or not my sweet guy was too. Because I struggle with whether or not anyone could ever love all of me.

Even knowing how much I hurt him and how it made me want to punish myself, and all those dark dark days after we broke up, I still smile when I think of him and our relationship. And that's confusing as hell. But it's because I'm thinking about how much we loved each other. The love was never the problem. Ultimately, our breakup came down to the question of "is love enough?" Is it enough to forget about all our differences. Is it enough to build a future. Is it enough when there's nothing else. When it doesn't make sense. Geographically, financially, culturally. And the other question of "how much pain should you go through for love?" He always said he would do anything for us. Because we were worth it. Because being together was the most important thing. And it surprised the hell outta me that I couldn't agree. Me, this die hard romantic looking for earth-shattering Pam and Jim type love everywhere I went. It didn't feel like enough. Long distance was extremely hard. It really tested us, and while I thought we were failing he thought we could stick it out. I felt I could not go on with our relationship the way it was, especially not with any end in sight. He thought we could make it through anything. And I was the piece of shit that abandoned ship. Because it turns out I'm no good at being unhappy, even for the greater good. If there is one. It turns out more than love, I want happiness. I search for it. I pray for it every night, I wish for it on every eyelash, every coin thrown in the fountain, every birthday candle blown out.

Is it so bad that I want to be happy? He would say "that's not the only thing in life. You can't be happy all the time." I know that. I know I can't always be happy but is it so wrong to want to come as close to that as possible? I'm 22 years old. I'm young. If I'm in the position to choose happiness I will choose that. If I'm in the position to reject unhappiness, I will do that. And I have no idea if that's horrible or how screwed up that makes me. I'll ask my therapist. But for someone who saw firsthand how it takes more than love to sustain a marriage and keep a family together, someone who taught herself not to depend on love, not to trust it, it kinda makes sense right? I no longer feel horrible for breaking up with him. It rid my life of so much stress and frustration that I was holding onto at the time, but it also rid my life of his love. And he did make me so happy. Giddy with joy. High on love. I don't hold out on the possibility that we'll be together sometime later in life. When we're both ready for each other. When he understands why I believe I need more than just love, and I understand that he believes happiness and unhappiness are not mutually exclusive. I think that's the lesson he was trying to teach me. That it's not black and white (HA. 'Cause he's white and I'm black. So.. yeah you get it). That sometimes life exists in the grey for a while and it's messy, but it's life. I guess I'm not ready for that. Life. My anxiety and depression are nodding yes. But is anyone ever ready for life? Actually maybe some people are. I'll ask my therapist.