Category — i wanna know what love is

Under the dim light of the overhead lamp, I asked her the same question I’ve asked forty eleven billion times in the past seven days.

For the love of God, why did he take me home from the bar?

I caught the slightest flinch in her pretty brown eyes, an anticipation of my reaction, perhaps half a second- nearly imperceptible- before she replied.

Because you’re fucking hot and the sex is great.

It hung in the air there for a moment, and I wanted so badly to argue, to give a thousand tiny reasons why it just couldn’t be that simple. I really only had one I was willing to own at that point.

But he could have found another pretty girl and taken her home, a girl that wasn’t so complicated, a situation that wouldn’t have required any damage control…

She cut me off, the way a mother rips a band-aid to spare you the agony of a slow pull.

He didn’t think about that until it was too late.

I wanted to argue with her, but doing so would have created a dissonance even I cannot maintain. She filled that empty space with the same words everyone else has, but hers lacked the same softness of pity.

He isn’t who you think he is, he can’t give you what you want, you can do so much better, you deserve so much more.

And then, then she said what no one else had the nerve to. Which is one of the many reasons I cherish her friendship.

You created the man you fell in love with in your mind. You filled in the gaps with what you wanted to see there. It isn’t there. That man only exists in your head. He isn’t real. If the man that you’re so in love with actually existed, we would not be sitting here having this discussion. Please tell me you understand what I’m saying. I need to know that you realize this.

I nodded, horrified at the realization, and still more horrified at the words rising in my throat like bile. My desire to defend him, to explain our complicated history, to stand up for him, to tally the long list of my own faults and missteps- I choked it back like vomit and let her words sink in.

As the night wore on clarity settled in like frost, bringing stark relief to the texture of everything: the good memories, the bad memories, the fact that he tells people that he loves “that woman” but disappeared without warning or explanation because he couldn’t say it to me, the warnings and condolences of our closest mutual friends, his incorrigible habit of reminiscing whenever our paths crossed last year. The odd comment or two that I never could give any context, the way that he opened that once-closed door three weeks ago for a night, and the way that he slowly and carefully shut it again, so that by the time I heard the click of the lock in the frame I could do nothing but lay against it and writhe with heartache.

The last time he broke my heart I was nearly catatonic with shame and self-loathing; convinced as I was that I had some fatal flaw, that I was unworthy of love, that I had destroyed my destiny with expectation and grasping.

At three-thirty this morning, after so many in a row that it feels normal again, and I get antsy when my morning glories linger in the hallways, I am still mired in shame.

The difference is that I now very clearly understand that I carried this delusion- the war between fear and love- into every single involvement I’ve had since he first kissed me under that streetlight.

I’ve made some incredibly poor decisions regarding the feelings of others and my own safety in some kind of twisted game of emotional chicken, and for that I couldn’t be more ashamed.

As my little sister often says, the truth can only kill that which is unjust.

She’s awfully wise for her years.

So am I, and I’m here to tell you:

The worst lies are not the ones that someone else tells you, or even the ones that you’ve told someone else.

The most dangerous lies are the ones we tell ourselves.

Blossoms, for all their intricate beauty, are fruitless without pollination. Their purpose is to attract bees, birds, and butterflies to send and receive their magic fairy dust, the secret code that unlocks fruit and seed production. Fertilized or barren, the spent blossoms flutter from their stems after a short and exquisite show; the legacy of the plant relies on fruition.

Only pollen with enough genetic variety to produce healthy offspring will result in reproduction, which is why most plants require cross-pollination. Fruit borne of their own pollen alone would produce weak stock, vulnerable to blight and sterility, so a molecular defense exists to encourage only successful genetic combinations.

At breakfast the other morning, Wendy pointed out a forsythia bush on the edge of the parking lot. It was covered in half-open blossoms, spent before they could unfurl. I wept for it later, the poor sweet thing, doing its humble best to send fairy dust into the world, expending all that effort and energy desperately pushing flowers into a dormant, barren landscape. Tricked by unseasonably warm temperatures into performing for empty rows of hard metal seats, with nary a honeybee to carry its whisper, and only silence on its carpels.

Nature, for all her exquisite wisdom, delivers such cruelly objective consequences for her creatures’ timing errors. When the blooms open at just the right time, a pollinator that favors that plant and its best genetic crosses will visit just long enough to dance the timeless waltz of creation on its petals, leaving dreams and carrying wishes away on their furry legs and antennae.

The promise of fruit is made that very moment; if the plant is given enough sunshine, water and fresh air but is left otherwise undisturbed, the next generation will push forth from the stems, sent from deep within the all roots and veins, cell by cell, to make new life in the soil below.

The forsythia will most surely find itself frostbitten, frozen over, flowers encased in a coat of icy shards that will cut them to shreds upon thawing, leaving a pile of rotted mush to seep into its roots, inevitably restarting the cycle of life, birth and hope under the ground. Another chance to get it right.

My heart ached to impart some comfort, to reassure it that the secret workings of the universe are as impersonal as gravity: when the season and conditions are right the magical becomes the inevitable, the soil is richened for its failed effort, time and wisdom produce fruit sweetened by experience and patience. Gratitude for its timely reminder seeped from the marrow of my stiff and tired hips: buds and berries set on their own time, in their own way, thriving on a lack of human interference in the magic of nature.

It will have learn on its own the difference between January and March, and the futility of blooming at the first signs of warmth instead of having enough faith to wait for spring, that opening is just a start. In its struggle, it will discover that the beauty of its blossoms are just a vessel for its essence, which lays in wait for that familiar ancient whisper to awaken it to fruition.

I smiled as I wiped the tears from my cheeks, though, because I know the joy of mastering those lessons: an entire existence dripping with life and sustenance from every stem and branch, with roots enough to anchor and nourish, and wishes given flight on the wings of bees.