Love at 25: An Unfinished Introduction

For the past few months I have lived in a contemplative trance. Holding patterns like my current one (as I wait to return home) can be quite conducive for personal growth and exploration if given the proper consideration and appropriate attitude. I’ve tried to apply that attitude wherever I can, and I highly recommend it. Next time you’re waiting for a movie to start or in line at Wal-Mart, ignore the magazines at your elbow (I don’t care whose rack Cosmo is featuring this month) and take a moment to examine your place in the universe. You never know what you may find. The intoxicating aroma of beef jerky and bubble gum may just facilitate a life-changing discovery. Little known fact: Plato conceived Allegory of a Cave in line at the DMV. Filling up many months with contemplation can be a little more treacherous than the fleeting thoughts one might get at the checkout counter, so build up some endurance before you dive headfirst into life's great mysteries.

My philosophical sensibility tends quite fickle, deconstructing one topic to a hopeless mush before moving on to do the same to something else. The history of my blog represents this wonderfully. Politics and religion got beat down in the early months before I moved on to my writing. Then the summer movie season got into full swing, so that’s been the majority of May and June. Yet none of these things really managed the synaptic stranglehold that love has recently. I was shocked to find that, aside from one very brief contemplation of knights slaying dragons, that sacred cow had not been eviscerated in my crosshairs of cynicism like just about every other convention we hold dear these days.

Why is that? I asked myself. Once I lay aside my shield of mocking bluster and repressed my relationship history, the answer came very easy.

Very simply, I don’t want to. For me to lose love in my heart (just as I lost faith) would be like snuffing out that last corner of my soul that occasionally lights the dark. I do have a history of self-destructive behavior, but I don’t thrill in pain and misery so much that I would quash my one great chance to rise out of the muck of my own self-righteous gloom. God is dead. My future is uncertain. The Cubs are below .500. If I slaughtered love, my lord, what would be left?

I have not given up on love. Coming from the family I do such action would not only be foolish, but it would also completely disregard of the evidence with which I am surrounded. And there’s nothing I hate more than an argument absent compelling evidence. So, I will not be destroying love on these pages, especially when so many other people seem to doing a perfectly good job destroying it for the rest of us.

Yes, I still believe in love, but that doesn’t mean it’s safe in my heart. Love has been attacked from all sides in my life. Normally, I’d let the bleak world have it; the world’s made a good case for love’s invalidation. It poisons love even as it bombards us with reminders of its blessings. I wish I could step aside. I wish I could just throw my hands up and discard this Hallmark bullshit.

But there was this girl.

Her name was Erika Thormahlen.

She's the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.