A confession of love

I heard someone say "I am in love with love." That made me wonder. It's true, that feeling of being so alive, so excited, seeing things through that pink (purple) fog is something most people long for. I certainly do. No matter how clearly I understand that everything has to start with loving myself and that I have to feel good on my own, in my own skin, it doesn't change the fact of the matter: that I want to be wanted and loved and I want to have someone special I can share things/my life with. I think we all do, even though some might think or say otherwise. And so it only makes sense that it's easy to fall in love with the idea of love.

With that being said, when it comes to this issue, I specialize in meeting, liking, and subsequently falling for (whether in love or in lust, is a question that remains to be answered in most cases) unavailable men. In most cases, this is geographical - I can't help but wonder whether life used to be much easier back when the world was small and people never really left the village or town where they were born, but then again, I would have been bored to death - often unrequited, but probably the worst of all, is when he is with someone else already. For all these reasons, I have always considered this feeling of "being in love" to be accompanied with some amount of hurt. Still, I think that I want to fall in love, and hopelessly hope that one day, when it's meant to be, it will not be painful.

I love this quote from the book I just finished reading:

"... love isn't a good sailor and it languishes on a sea voyage. You'll be surprised when you have the Atlantic between you and Larry to find how slight the pang is that before you sailed seemed intolerable.
- Do you speak from experience?
-From the experience of a stormy past. When I suffered from the pangs of unrequited love I immediately got on an ocean liner."

W. Somerset Maugham: The razor's edge

This often works, I have to say. Also speaking from experience of a past filled with cross-Atlantic relationships - or at least a couple. Not just cross-Atlantic, cross-country, or cross-state, the scale might be different, but the effect usually similar. But what if after a few months have gone by and yet the feeling doesn't seem to pass, my mind free to wonder arrives at the same thought, the same fantasy, the same person day after day. More than anything, this scares me, but at the same time, I am somehow unable to let it go completely, maybe because I am in love with the idea of love and I am so afraid that if the feeling goes away, then the pang of not being in love will hurt all the more.

In any case, if not an ocean liner, but a cross-Atlantic flight next week should help too.