a thousand years

It doesn't matter how we met, or how long we we're friends.  It doesn't matter how long I've felt the way I do, or how long she's kept me at an arms length.  Pulling me in closer and pushing me away.  A sideways roller coaster of pure emotion.  I've been in love before.  I've felt the grip on my heart like a soft hand.  When you're young, it takes on a different form.  Puppy love they call it.  Its a fitting way to describe it.  Its sloppy, and uncoordinated.  Its cute and innocent and fuzzy.  But invariably it grows up, and becomes something else.  When you're a teenager, its more like love.  The heartbreaking, soul churning entity that stays in your head like a song on repeat.  You try to put it in perspective, but you're still too young...too inexperienced to fully grasp what it is you're feeling.  She's not the one, even if she feels like it.  You don't know her even if you feel like you do in your bones.  It get uncomfortable.  It twists you up inside.  It makes you mad enough that you want to run away and bury yourself in the ground 100 feet deep.  But its love.  

All these years later, I still look back on the girls...the ones who made me feel...and all I can do now is shake my head and laugh and cry.  Just a little.  They we're real.  It was real.  But it wasn't real.  Not like life is now.  Not like anything now.  Now, its all about survival.  About making a life and babies and living with each other in a partnership of comfort and convenience.  Love doesn't seem to mean what it used to.  Its been diluted and deformed.  Its the love you watched growing up.  Mom and Dad holding hands and kissing on New Years Eve.  The way the looked at each other after driving the kids around all day.  

I don't know what I expected.  The fantasy is so enticing.  It's like a perfect day.  All blue skies and warm sun and perfume.  Its the shape only she makes.  Its the way she looks at you and you wish she'd look at you  like that forever nonstop.  You don't want to break the glance out of fear that it'll never feel that good again.  

To all the girls, past and distant past, I thank you for making me feel something so crazy.  It hurt more than it helped.  It sent me spiraling into tailspins and into dark oblivion, but it was real.  It was my heart on the most amazing drug I ever knew.

I hope one day that I'll find a way to capture that feeling again.  To lock eyes and know that it'll be that real again.  So real.  Like a missile attack on my soul.  Lighting me up in a way nothing else can.

Until then, I'll try and keep the corpse warm.