I had heard it before but I never knew it ’til then; one overcast day with chance of showers, the lyrics unexpectedly crept. It was one of those awkward days where your mind is continuously jogged by the infamous “to do” list and you like it so because you’re not sure what you’d with yourself without it. It was one of those days. In a song I heard “love is facing all your fears” and I understood without having heard the lyrics prior or the lyrics following this apparent “punch line”. It was as if I had been tuning a radio and gave up on reception until the news broke through; what I needed to know, and just in time. Love is facing all your fears.
My life has been blessed by another, one whom I never anticipated to meet. I first spoke to him the week I left for New York City, a state of mind for me at that time, the same week as cupid’s; February 14th. He was a friend, then and we entertained one another with descriptions of our lives. This was the “getting to know one another”, though I felt, strangely, like we already did.
My second night in NY, I had exhausted myself by the city’s seductions. My feet worn and my heart warm, I spent the remainder of my evening describing to him, through writing, how New York City looked from the sky when we had landed the evening prior. I felt he just had to know what it looked like and what it felt like to arrive in that city; it was so very enchanting. I didn’t even know his favorite color then, but I spent the remainder of my evening finding the words to describe:
“As we flew over New York I saw the blue tip of the Empire State. I thought we were going to scrape it. It was just phenomenal. Lights galore. The city, from the sky, looked like the sky itself, inverted with the ground. Embedded and pinned with gold against velvet blue. As we drew closer we found the stars to be buildings and the velvet the blue. It’s so vast. I think you’d love it here. City lights is all I see.”
Like the back of some postcard, I had hoped he’d take my words and put them in some “forget-me-not” box. After I had sent this “postcard” I went to sleep in the city that doesn’t know how to and awoke early the next day to walk Hudson River. There along that river I found my intrigue. The wood of the boardwalks lining the river were dry and seasoned. We had walked along the boards compelled and drawn to the water; wearing our jeans and sneakers, we snapped candid photos. When my friends and I weren’t laughing at our inability to take a good photograph, we were off in our own directions, flirting with our scenery and its company. Two by two I was intrigued. Couples just lined the boardwalk; talking to one another, walking dogs together, laughing and taking photographs together (like my friends and I had been earlier), and loving one another. In a metropolis these secrets existed. In a city of 18 million people, I reckoned that all you need is one, sometimes. Being there felt like hearing Aretha Franklin’s “Bridge Over Troubled Waters”. It was suspending in that I realized the privilege of having a love to call your own or that which makes a love. I thought of how “we entertained one another with descriptions of our lives” and I wanted to place a long distance call. But I never did. At the same time that I realized what a privilege it is to be in love or have someone to love and love you in return, I realized that I was afraid. How do you ever know that what you think or what you feel dwells in another? How do you know that someone can see what you see? Even words don’t suffice; like promises, love can be broken. It can only be as good as your word, but even so, time can only prove your word. I think that’s why most people want to be married, sometimes; it’s a promise that can’t be broken, or really shouldn’t be. You have someone’s word that they will love you ’til the end of your time. What could be more comforting, I’d like to know. But I was afraid that along that Hudson River and miles South, this person, this new compliment to my life, (and the one whose favorite color I didn’t even know), wasn’t thinking of me; it was silly, how could he? But everyday I was in New York City I came home to my place on Broadway to find a message in my inbox. I was grateful and afraid. What goes up must come down? Maybe we’d just be (and remain) the kind of friends that would write letters to one another throughout our entire lives and we’d reunite on the day of his wedding or mine and tell people we were “old friends”. If it ever amounted to that, I’d be satisfied, I had reasoned. We are both the kind of people that have ambitions and things we’d like to do alone. I could receive his letters of happiness and he could receive mine, like he was now. Maybe.
**
It’s nearing October now and I don’t spend much time writing in my curtains, anymore, at least not like I had last Fall. I haven’t written a letter since he was in Serbia. But I’m still afraid, because I don’t write letters to him anymore. We’ve overcome letters and stamps. I fear that because in any situation, in any relationship, you’re just as far in as you’ll ever be out. You spend your time the way your heart tells you to. And what if your heart doesn’t believe in the same things his does? What if his heart can’t see tire swings and autumn leaves or the vines in Bordeaux or dinners that erupt in laughter and ongoing narratives? What if your heart anticipates? Anything short of anticipation is a true disappointment and bruise.
If you are afraid or fearful of the death of a love or the disappointment of a love, and love is in fact facing all your fears, love, then, is confronting itself and the possibility that it can leave you. If you’re afraid of love leaving you but you love anyway, then it’s true; love is facing all your fears. True love is loving someone regardless of the situation, or the potential outcome in hypthosis; loving regardless of less than desired outcomes (which our fears often consist of). Love, as I had discovered throughout my life and along the Hudson River, can be precious and rare. Once you have it, do not fear losing it, because by doing so you’re neglecting it, or certain aspects of it. By fearing disappointments in love you are paying heed to what could spoil it or the love you may find in the future. So write letters, and and talk about skylines, and say “I miss you” and appreciate the people around you who expose their “vulnerability” in intertwined hands and leashes on the boardwalk. Love makes you vulnerable, sure, but should it matter? Love makes you stonger; you’re only vulnerable to yourself without it. Wherever you go, even in thought, there is the ghost of a love; past or present and never does it reduce you; it makes you. Don’t fear ‘you’.
