Not Quite a Love Song

Some nights my soul seems to get lost. I cannot name the day I first felt this sense of loss, but I can remember the time. It seems a time long in my past and yet forever with me. Every so often I hope I’ve moved beyond this feeling and then it comes back. It comes on ethereal wings, lightly, floating into my being like a ghost, passing through and then going away after a time. I sometimes look into the faces of others and recognize the lingering marks of similar ghosts…a certain light in their eyes…the doorway left open for the haunt to come again when the hour arrives.

My kindness, my charity, my desire to help people is the recognition of this ghost. To know that we have all grown up and fought demons, that each of our stories is profound, that each of our hardships breaks our soul each day and we look around for someone to help us…and to save us. I don’t know if I do a very good job at it. I think most of us put all our hopes of salvation in love…in the belief that what we need is one, just one, who holds us close, who keeps us safe. I cannot love everyone in the way they need…it is not my nature to believe that that is acceptable and most others share this viewpoint. But then comes the time on some quiet nights where I ask myself: "Who will save me?"

I am haunted. I see so much beauty in the world and in people and I try to give it back…and every success seems so insignificant and every failure so monumental. My faith in myself shakes at the thought that no one else will believe in me as deeply as I do myself. And it is a horrible thing for me, but I have the mentality that not all who are great find greatness. And it is my fear that I will fail to prove anything. And all the heartaches of my early life that have weighed upon me will never be expunged and I will succumb to being possessed by this ghost rather than forcing it out of me and carrying on…

I want to accept her love completely and feel completely loved. But, in honesty, I don’t yet. It is my fault for certain. I set this whole relationship up across a great distance, and the obstacles that have presented themselves only point to a logical failure, only discourage…we have surmounted so much it’s heartening. It is also the fault of my past. Of past relationships, that I must share the responsibility for allowing to occur. But I do not trust completely. Ironically, I torture myself further by refusing to pry, to corner, to demand, I simply drive myself sick with paranoid worry and do nothing about it.

I love her. Deeply. Madly. Completely. I say goodnight to her picture and I think upon being with her more than anything. I play beautiful songs to remind me of her, I imagine my future, our future…I imagine looking forward along the great expanse of time that is my life and it unfolding and filling with images of houses and children and birthdays and Christmases with her. With her family, with mine….with the days of travel and nights in bed…of everything that I grew up cherishing that was shattered at the end of my youth, when the days of innocence ended and the days of haunting began. I look back and wonder if the pleasures of my life were my naive and young mind not understanding, misreading everything…or if something bad happened that changed it all. I want to believe there was joy in those experiences and I want to reclaim that innocence and goodness that I possessed when I was young. I want to be able to instill it in others…through my writing, my acting….I want to give to everyone the sense of wonder that I at least felt when I was young and which seems fleeting and dying now inside me and others. It is my metaphoric way of reaching out and holding each person close and saying, "You are safe. You are not alone. I believe in the wonder, too. I have seen the magic you have seen. It was not an illusion. It was real, and we will go and find it again."

I think it unfair to ask of her to give these things to me..or perhaps that’s the cynical side of me, the one who thinks I might as well just move on and forget. The part of me that says I must always always always be strong. But part of me refuses. Part of me is dead set on trying hard to make her at least feel this magic…to keep it alive, a sense of wonder and amazement at the greatness of the world and the people in it and in return, hope that I can be weak in her arms in the night. That I can let every guard down and be innocent and young always there.

I’m sorry, I’m rambling. I don’t know where my mind is tonight. I have not had a drop to drink…I feel rested…I just feel…lost. I love her.

I love her.

Good night.