Of love and life

I've resigned myself to the fact that I will live alone. Forever.

I'm too old and too committed to freedom, paid too big a price for it, to share my house, my bed, my life with someone full-time. I've attempted this dating thing that boggles my mind and breaks my spirit (at times) with it's unrelenting new rules and ever-changing mores.

I had one guy disappointed when he found out I wasn't in any stage of menopause (the birth control factor). I have been chased by men in their early thirties who feel that dating within my own range only leaves me open to a pitiful pool of men needing kegs of Red Bull and frequent doses of Viagra to keep up.

I've been pursued by much older men who still think that acquiring a hot, young chick is the cat's meow even though at 45, I'm not hot, nor young nor even a chick anymore.

Broken-down men hobbled by bad divorces, bankruptcies, foreclosures and rising child support payments living back home with mom seem to think I might find them a tasty catch.

Worst still, I still gravitate toward the one person whom I think knows me best of all, the man who fell in love with my words before ever thinking of bedding me, the man who raises my nettle and my spirits all in one conversation.

The man who makes me think, while reminding me I think way too much. He's let me rail against him as substitute for the world. He had slices in his soul hiding bits of my shame that he alone knows. The man who makes me be a better person because when he is in my orbit, everything realigns and suspends somehow how it should.

But even this, I question.

For when he did commit to me fully, I ran like the most skittish of fawns into the deep woods and only when he retreated did I find the courage to exit the brush. I sometimes think if he came to me now and laid his heart for me to take, that I would once again run like Artemis sure that he was in a million ways wrong for me.

But to me, he feels like home. The world never looks safer than from the vantage point of peering just over his broad shoulders.

But I am a daughter of hope. It has scarred me and healed me. I am a late bloomer too. And I am cuttingly aware that if we had coupled years ago when new love blazes, it would have ended in an inferno charring us both. I know this. But I know that things have changed, evolved. The inferno just lit embers. I don't know that he knows this.

I am done convincing him.

Timing is everything and things come to me when they will. I know this. I just don't know if this will make it's way toward me. It seems I'm destined to have a trail of failed relationships behind me.

I question why I love and whom I love for my definition is skewed, faulty. It seems in this arena, I cannot see like others. It is cloudy, no matter how much I wish for clarity and clean the glass.


©L'uragana