Deliverance

Deliverance

1. The action of being rescued or set free.

In the last post I briefly mentioned that my perception of love had recently been called into question; this perception being that the all important relationship between love and timing was absolute. My previously steadfast belief was that love in real life, as opposed to the fantastical Hollywood version, occured almost exclusively when an individual had decided that it was time to "fall in love". My conviction being that whether the target of their romantic overtures was deserving of such high regard or not was largely irrelevant.

When I sat down to write this, I had planned to serve up a mouth-watering hypothesis for you to salivate upon. Instead, I'm going to thrash the muddy, stinking waters of my own sole experience of love.

And of course to do that, I have to forcefully wedge some context down your willing throat.

For the last few years, a sobering thought had loomed ominously in my mental peripheral vision. For a while at least, this thought was the metaphorical floating mucus on my pupil; always slipping to one side when I attempted to examine it thoroughly. It was only over the last 24 months or so that I became able to grab the pesky cerebration by its ears and bring it under close inspection. And the realisation was as simple as it was disgustingly complex. I was unable to fall in love. Somewhere, deep inside, there was a part of me that was broken.

You see, I've always been rather good at clinical thinking. Weighing up decisions, risk versus reward, pros against cons...all with those troublesome emotional elements removed. For as long as I can recall, I've treated relationships in the same way. "Well, I don't want to have to deal with the drama of a breakup." I would muse. "Do I really think this girl is someone I could spend a lifetime with?" I would contemplate. Invariably, the answer was the same. Fuck no. And so I ran for the hills, emotionally withdrawing long before any girl had a chance of having some kind of impact upon me.

Perhaps you can see the obvious flaw in these kind of thought processes? If you hold back from letting yourself get close to anyone, you'll never get close to anyone. But shit, if you do let someone get close then their actions have the ability to impact on how you feel.

And of that, I am not a fan.

I'm going to cut an increasingly lengthy diatribe short. I met a girl. I met a girl at work of all places. And my word, was she beautiful. I don't just mean that she was physically attractive. That goes without saying. I mean that she was as pretty on the inside as she was stunning on the outside. Just a look, just the slightest glance from her would entice the hairs lazing comfortably on the back of my neck to jump to attention, puffing out their chests with basic instinct.

Of course, as we all know, life is a bitch. She had a boyfriend. And so I ignored my feelings. For a while. And then, I thought "Fuck it.".

I won't go into the details of how the affair started. It's not something that I'm proud of. I justified it to myself in a simple fashion. I wasn't just trying to fuck her. The more time I spent with her, both at and away from work, the more I knew. This was a girl I could spend my life. This was exactly the girl that I could marry.

I can't pinpoint the exact moment when I knew that I had fallen madly in love with her. When the very thought of her made my heart pound for the beauty of a world where she was by my side. But I knew. I wasn't broken. I just hadn't met the right girl before. I hadn't met her before. I would lay in bed with her nestling her perfect head on my chest wondering just how I had possibly got so lucky.

She ended it. Our tumultous affair, the bastard timing of when and how we met meant that, in reality, it was never going to last. However much I pretended that it would. I was smooth. I parted from her with my reassuring words dripping like silken honey down her ear canal. And in private, I wept. I cried over a girl like all of the emotional weaklings that I so despised. Bollocks.

Lord Alfred Tennyson confidently told us 'Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.'

Lord Alfred Tennyson was a fucking idiot.

I wasn't happy thinking that I was broken, that I just didn't have the ability to love. But now? Now that I know that I can? Once in 27 years I met a girl that made my heart leap out of my chest and slap the back of my head, until my dizzy brain collapsed into a mush of fuzzy love hearts and song birds. And there have been plenty of other girls. It seems foolish to envision that another girl who could make me feel the same way is just over the horizon. And I'm meant to believe that the memories are worth the anguish? Surely it's better to always be blind than to be granted sight for such a fleeting moment? Better to have never known the wonder of a song than to hear just one melody?

As far as I can see it, Lord Alfred Tennyson was an absolute moron.

Part of me wishes that I'd never met this girl. That I was able to continue blindly stumbling on, without knowing that in the sky was a sunset of the ilk I would likely never see again.

I found out that I wasn't the broken man I thought I was. And it left me a broken man.

How's that for deliverance?