Love. In all shapes and sizes, colors and hues, romantic or platonic, love is a pain in the ass of enormous proportions. The bigger your ability to love, the more of yourself you give away. Love is never patient, usually not kind, but the biggest lie of all is that love will conquer all. Not so. Love conquers nothing. Love is the enemy. The battle lines are always drawn when love comes into the picture. Love is to be conquered. To be sublimated. To be caged and put in a zoo and never fed by the public at large. Love will bite the hand that feeds it and feed on the hand that reaches out to it.
Keep your hands out of love's cage. It is not to be trusted. It looks so idyllic when you first set your eyes upon it. It curls up around your ankles and purrs. It sits on your lap and swishes its tail as your stroke its silky coat. You feel so warm and fuzzy. Then one day, you turn your back for a minute and love sinks its sharp little teeth into your butt!
That's love.
Still, you feel that maybe it was your fault that this love was so panicky it had to grab onto you. Perhaps you made it feel threatened. You think maybe you could have been a bit kinder and gentler. So you aim to keep love happy and secure. And so love behaves, purrs, wags it's tail and uses the litter box at the appropriate times. You are so happy. You have love. Love has love. It's a win-win situation.
Until the day you feel those razor sharp love bites on your ass again. You turn around and look at your beloved love with the pain of betrayal in your eyes. Love can't stand to see you looking at it through the eyes of truth. So what does love do? It sweet talks you into believing it wasn't the one who bit you. YOU are the one who bit you.
"How can that be?" you say to love.
"I dunno. You're the one who did it", love says with a baffled shrug.
So you sit and puzzle over how you did such a terrible thing to yourself.
And you apologize to your love for thinking this erroneous thought about it.
Love forgives you. Because love never holds a grudge.
You fall into that false sense of security. You know in the deepest part of your brain cells that it is false. In the place where you are really you, the place you dare not go, you know that there is no security when you let love lead your life for you. Still, you sit back, love on your lap, swishing and purring; only leaving your presence for short trips to the poop box and all is well because love always trusts.
But one day, love stands up on your thigh. Out come the claws and it kneads your flesh. You ask love "what are you doing? Look, I'm bleeding!"
"I didn't do that", love says. "You're the one whose bleeding. Why look at me?"
And love jumps down from your bleeding thighs an sashays right on past the litter box and out the door - where there is another warm and inviting lap waiting, minus the disgusting blood.
You are left alone, bleeding and in pain. You cry. Infection sets in. It stinks up the joint. You sit in shocked stillness until someone comes along and gives you a shot of antoboitics.
It takes some time but you heal. You forget the pain. And you stop looking for love in all the wrong places.
Then one day you feel something warm and furry around your ankles. So begins another terrifying bout of love...
No comments:
Post a Comment