21 years ago, I felt that I believed in love more than
anything else in the world. Love mattered more than anything, and I was a
person willing to fight for it, earn it, hold it, nurture it and protect it. I
needed love so badly that I was willing to do anything for it. And unlike the
Meatloaf song, I’d even have done “that”.
21 years ago a wonderful movie arrived in theaters, and it
was like it was tailor-made for this wide eyed wanderer. Because it put love on
a pedestal and for 105 minutes the audience got to find love, pursue love, fall
in love with love, adore love, and worship love, and above all else, love.
Above all things, love. No matter
about distance, no matter about a broken heart, no matter about anything, LOVE
won out, big time in the end.
21 years ago, this person—let’s call this person “Hildy” for
the sake of brevity and clarity—knew what love was. Hildy knew all the facts
about love, how it worked, how it was supposed to go. The more impatient among
you may be tempted to suggest that Hildy was an idiot, and that would be fair,
but the more generous and tolerant may be thinking that maaaaybe this
Hildy person just had a lot to learn. A lot. A LOT to learn. Maybe. (Hint: YES.
OMFG. A LOT.)
And as time passed, Hildy did, in fact, learn. A lot. Fucked
up. A lot. Loved a lot. Lost a lot. Lost more.
But never once lost faith in love.
Until.
There’s always an “until” in these stories.
Until.
I watched Sleepless in Seattle that night for the first
time in…I don’t know. I don’t know how long it had been. And I found myself
mourning that person with the enduring, unshakable faith in love and all it had
to offer. And I don’t mean any kind of gentle, “awww, what the hell happened to
my younger idealistic idiot self” mourning. I mean
tears-running-down-my-face-wtf-happened-to-that-essential-core-belief-in-love kind
of mourning.
In the last few years, during the course of some rather
unpleasant relationship issues, I let that Hildy finally and completely slip
away, and I never went looking. I let that wide eyed wanderer and her eternal
belief in love drown just as surely as if she had been Jack hanging on to that
door on the Titanic.
Tonight I pinpointed that moment when I let it happen. That
moment when love—my faith in it, my belief in it—stopped being a factor. The
moment when that part of me just…separated and went its own way.
And I…I just let it happen. I didn’t fight it; I didn’t
scream and rail against the injustice of it all. I just let it happen. I became
complacent, or was it defeated? Anyway it was very much unlike the same wide
eyed Hildy that walked out of that theater 21 years ago.
21 years ago I stepped out of a movie theater, and skipped
hand in hand with love down to the waterfront in Seattle. I felt vindicated,
like someone else out there actually got what love was. I was pretty sure that
getting in my car and driving home was just going to be fucking impossible, so
I went dancing on the pier and wandering through downtown Seattle with someone
I loved.
21 years ago I had a lot of necessary and painful lessons
and experiences ahead of me. But losing that essential part of me, that love of
love, should never have been one of them.
I never went looking.
I’m looking, now.
(In my best Scarlett O’Hara accent, clutching at my heart) “As
God is my witness, as God is my witness they're not going to lick me. I'm going
to live through this and when it's all over, I'll never lose my love of love
again. No, nor any of my folk. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill. As God
is my witness, I'll never lose my love of love again.”
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