Sometimes, love hurts.

I love my family.  I love them entirely, whole-heartedly, and hard (as it’s been said to me).  So much so, that if something goes wrong I feel it for days.  Even if it has nothing to do with me, I feel it.

Our hearts, I don’t think they were designed to take this kind of ache.  The kind that cannot be numbed with over the counter medication, or booze,  The kind of ache that comes and goes as it pleases, like an unwanted guest.  The kind of ache that comes with memories of better times.  Moments and memories  triggered by simple sounds and scents and pictures of times before.  I don’t think our hearts were designed to take this weight.  We’ve mourned over the years, the human race.  For loss of those taken to early (in our opinion), for those who were taken by war, and disease.  We mourn for those who lived longer than we thought they would and we celebrate the life and memories they left behind but all of that mourning seems to come in death.

What happens when we mourn life?

What happens when we are living day to day, not just surviving…LIVING our lives, as I finally am, and we get stabbed in the heart? How do we get through this?  The breakups, the unemployment, the moments when we realize if we buy 3 packages of ramen it won’t cost $1, it will cost $36 because of an overdraft fee.  Those are not moments of mourning in life, those are flubs, mistakes, fuck-ups.  They are trying times.  Times most people consider “times of tests” or “times of lessons.”  They are times that “build character.”

I don’t want more character, right now.  I just want my family back the way it was when love didn’t hurt.

My mom is fine.  My Dadda n Terry are fine.  My siblings are fine.  Happy, even.  But family is extensive and our hearts take people on differently than DNA or blood takes on the genetic portrayal of “family.”  Our eyes see people and our ears hear them, our hands and arms embrace them and our mouths exchange words and over time a bond is formed.  An attachment is created.  Then you yearn to hear their voice and see their smiles.  You yearn to listen to stories and see a story through their eyes.  You can’t wait to hug them and be close to them, sitting with them.  You can’t wait to surprise them, or make them laugh.  You want to be there for them when they cry, when their children cry.  Family is so much more than DNA or Love.

And sometimes our flesh and blood will betray us.  And sometimes those we choose to call family, will betray us.  And we have to choose.  We have to let our brain run it’s logic course, and let our emotions run their courses and eventually we find…something.  We seek, mostly.  But sometimes we also find something.  We find closure, or balance, or a new meaning, or a new lesson.  And on our way to that closure, or balance, or new meaning, or new lesson we look for distractions.

A distraction.  Something or someone to keep our mind away from doing it’s job: from figuring it all out.  Which ultimately complicates things more because our brains, and hearts, can only endure so much without trying to deal with superficial decisions and distractions.  Things that only make us feel on our skin.

It doesn’t matter if someone’s touch makes your skin burn with excitement, if you’re heart is actually somewhere else.  It doesn’t matter if someone smiles at you if you have someone else on your mind that you’d rather see a smile from.  Don’t you get it?  It doesn’t EVEN MATTER.

Well, I guess it doesn’t…until it does.  and I hate that kind of paradox or situational decision, or ..truth.  I hate it because it IS that simple and if it’s simple then…I don’t know.  And if it’s difficult then you can feel more, right?  If it’s difficult or risky or edgy or their touch burns your skin in the best way, why aren’t we sure they will burn right through to our hearts.  And it’s because that kind of distraction is temporary.  Temporary until there is room for permanency.  Temporary until your brain has figured something out, temporary until your heart has returned to it’s normal pattern of beating.  It’s all just…temporary.

Temporarily Lost

Temporarily Found

Temporarily in love, in lust, infatuated, distracted.

Temporarily unable to move.  Because the brain is overwhelmed and can’t send signals.  Because your eyes have glazed over and you are now seeing what you want to, instead of what’s actually in front of you and what’s actually happening right here and right now.  Because your heart  is aching, and the pulsing in your heart…hurts.  Hurts so much you could’ve sworn there was a death.  And maybe there was, just not how we’ve always recognized it.  We recognize things differently with our senses, yet we don’t seem to come to them–our senses.  Because we got so used to the constant, we forgot about the temporary.

Temporarily Lost

Temporarily Found

Temporarily saved

We accept the pain.  We accept, because of the pain, there will be mourning.  We accept the mourning because we somehow understand there is a Loss.  And as much as we try to name The Loss, we rarely land on “Love.”

We think we have love, or fall out of it as though it were a physical place holding us up or down. It is actually more like gravity.  And just like gravity can be defied, so can love.  And it’s when it snaps us back that it can hurt.

It’s when we aren’t paying attention that it makes us fall down.

Most of the time, we don’t really even know love is there ,until we are mourning the loss of it.