Intimate Connections

It is has been said for many and many a century that love is the purest form of expression there is. The rawest emotion we experience. The catalyst for life. And for many and many a poet, a muse.
As a child, I learned that there were different kinds of love. Parental love, love of God, love for friends. As an adult, I have come to see that the difference in love is not necessarily the specific way it can be categorized, but that it differs in a less abstract vernacular.  It is either love or it is not.
 As you go down your road, you gain a certain kind of wisdom, a second sight, or, perhaps a sixth sense, if you will. Things become clearer and more easily defined. All through my lengthy and exhausting marriage, I would often tell the story of how I remembered the very second when I realized I loved my subsequent husband. Oh, what a tale to tell, a great party favor, everyone gathered 'round to hear the eloquent narrative of my weakened knees in the wake of my so called destiny. When I look back on that day over twenty years ago, I sit here with absolute conviction that had I really loved him, I would have known it from the start, not realized it two months in. I also sit here with the acute awareness that what I felt for him was in fact, not love at all, an enlightening little verity, nonetheless. 
The awareness that real love has landed on our doorstep is absolutely terrifying. It isn't beautiful or sweet. It's uncomfortable and dirty. It does not offer any assurance, whatsoever. It complicates your life, distracts your thoughts, and renders even the most competent amongst us completely insane. It disrupts sleep, causes inflexible anxiety, and forces you to do things to yourself you never even realized you were capable of.
Over the past few weeks, I have been reverting to literature. My safe place. A beautifully told story can carry me away, allowing me a blessed respite from my own little private hell. However, sure enough, love walks in and there I am, reading Emily Dickinson's poems through tear stained eyes. I have to ask myself why writers through the years have placed such a creamy, soft centered value on love. From the moment I knew it had cursed me, and for real this time, I have been trying unsuccessfully to fight it off as if it were the flu. This appears to me to be a losing battle. Love has won at every turn. It has the strength of a thousand giants relentlessly determined to make me pay absolute attention to it, like some screaming two year old seeking the ardor of his mother. 
Love is not patient nor is it kind. I do believe Albert Ellis said it best when he stated, "The art of love is largely the art of persistence". Love is shocking and persuasive. And it is obvious. When it finds you, you recognize it. And it shocks you with the electrical current of a jellyfish. It stings you and scares you and you want to run away from it but it's translucent colors hypnotize you. Love has this magical ability to make you see past all of it's negative attributes and into the future. Honore de Balzac said, "A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea". And, yes, it is just that simple. It is either love or it is not. When it's the real thing, you will recognize it from the very first moment your eyes meet. And when you finally win the fight, or lose it, depending on how you look at it, and you let love in and get through all of the ugliness it has to offer, the rewards are surely exponential.
Love is not patient, nor is it kind. It is the lover who must be these things. As Ms. Dickinson so eloquently put it, "To love is so startling, it leaves little time for anything else". It takes away your concentration, your sleep, your control and all of your time, but when it comes to you, and you can see forever through the eyes of it, get in, sit down, fasten your seatbelt, and shut up. It's about to be one hell of a ride...

-Deannalynn Arzola