Lessons in Love

I've always been saying you can't love without an eye for the end. Someone enters my life and it's the instant connection, and I'm dropping everything to be a part of their life and they can be mine, but moments later I'm picking pieces back up and hiding them away. I can't love you fully, I think, this will be over soon anyway.

One lover or was he just a friend termed it a "crippling aversion to intimacy," but I think I was just softening the blow. Wasn't it a year ago, maybe a little longer, I was confessing that it was the only way to love? To care about someone, I had to remind myself I would be gone soon enough, or so would they.

I don't know where I'll be soon enough. I've left a career for something new, and even that is changing so rapidly. I don't know where I'm headed yet, I don't know who I can take with me and how I'll keep my connections. But last night it struck me: with love, it doesn't matter. Just because it may change, or the person may fade out of my life, does that mean my love can't be real? And is it really less painful to love and see it end than to never really love at all?

And so what if it does end -- does that make it less real? What makes love permanent? Is it that it reveals a permanent effect? Is it that I loved as deeply as I could at that time and now I can walk free of it, or even more fulfilled?

I feel a little embarrassed saying this, but opening my home up to a cat has changed my whole life. I've learned to accommodate another individual without losing my stability. My heart keeps opening up because I care about another being's wellness. I care about his existence. I like to see ours merging, I love it when he grooms my hair and kneads my stomach. I love falling asleep to the sound of his little motor pressed against my face.

I get scared because I keep thinking this has to end. I know it will someday; he can't be physically in my life forever. But put that aside a moment: the change he's effected on me has altered my approach to life so profoundly, that relationship will never end. He's put his print on me. That never goes away, does it? That's what makes love so lasting, we could even say permanent.

A year ago, I asked the Virgin Mary to teach me how to love.