My Unrequited Love

This week marks a year since the day she walked into my life. She walked right back out, but I expected no less. 2 months later she came back in on her own volition. This time she stayed and a month later I experienced her as I knew I wanted the moment I laid eyes on her. I should have know then what it was, but I was hurt, jaded, and living a lie as a player involved with a few women that I wasn't in love with. I’ve never lied to her. In fact, a day hasn’t passed that I haven’t thought about her. I’ve never wanted anyone more than her since that first day, and I haven't had anyone else in my heart the way she was since she left me standing in the cold.

From the first time I truly experienced her, I was hooked like an addict to their drug. Except my drug was love and she was my Helen of Troy, my Mona Lisa, my Aphrodite, my Oshun, my morning and my evening sun. For women that question do players feel, I am living proof that love and loss is what makes men players. That is why we choose not to care, to play games, to lie, and involve ourselves casually with multiple women. It guards our heart, keeps us safe, and protects us from falling and making just any woman the center of our world. We guard the keys to our hearts with the fiercest devotion, the same devotion some men are fortunate enough to use to protect their daughters and their family. All men experience this heartbreak once and most promise themselves never again. I am not most men and I’ve never wanted to be a player.

That's the funny thing about love, when some men fall, we fall forever. We never forget the woman we fell in love with. When we fall, we never give up. We remember her smell, her taste, her feel, her smile, and her eyes. We remember how it felt being with her. We remember her laugh, the face she made when she came, and the face she made when she cried. We never wanted to hurt her, but despite all her strength we never understood her vulnerabilities. Our heart never stops loving her even if our follow through is off the mark or our mind convinces us to finally let go and move on. We carry this to the grave because we never forget her and how she made us feel being with her.

Countless times I have woken up and gone to bed thinking about only one woman. Often it wasn't even the woman lying next to me. But sex didn't dissipate my feelings; it just helped me bottle them up so I wouldn't walk around hurting so much. My beloved chose not to be there beside me and every new woman helped me feel less and less until I could act without regard for her or myself. I could bury my feelings and my love so deep that only one person could ever hope to bring me salvation. But she never did. The women we love never understand the power of forgiveness. We may act in hate, displaying bitter resentment, but the stronger and more negative we react to her, the deeper our love was. A woman understanding this can pull us aside and with the gentlest of touches, caress our face, hold our hand, look into our eyes, and with powerful words say that she's sorry.

Sorry she never called. Sorry she never thought of us. Sorry for the fights, the hurtful words, the silence and the ignoring. Sorry she couldn't be completely honest with us. Sorry she wasn't there for us when we needed her most. Sorry she didn't comprehend our actions. Sorry she couldn't understand the magnitude of our despair and make all our hurt go away. Sorry she involved herself with other men who didn't who didn't see her the way we saw her and didn’t love her the way we did. Sorry she never understood how profound, how deep, how pure, and how true our love was for her and how she instead marginalized our feelings for her. Sorry she took that love for granted. Sorry she didn't love us in return. Sorry she wasn’t a better woman to us.

So I have spent many months now moving on and letting go. You can't choose who you fall in love with which is why so many men choose to never fall. But with her, I felt something that I have never felt with anyone else. So I will bottle up my feelings until the bottle collects dust and sits in the dark recesses of my soul where it will remain hidden and dormant until my dying breath. Hopefully, I'll go a day, a week, maybe even a month, and God help me a year not remembering where that shelf is. This is men's secret. This is how we love; this is how I love, with everything I have. So as a year passes and more milestones and memories fill my thoughts, I can muster one absolute truth from all that has transpired: I love you Cristmelda, and I always will. You can’t decide who you fall for but sometimes no matter how you feel, all the love you have to give simply isn't enough. So the bottle goes back on the shelf where it will be lost forever, if I’m lucky.

First 2 Bags Fly Free

I think of love as swinging at the piñata: some people will set you up and help you succeed because everyone wins when you break it open; others will let you miss, smack yourself in the face, and then laugh at you because they think better you than them. We’ve all been hurt by swinging our stick too wildly in the name of love. What we don’t always realize is some of us keep swinging blindfolded or choose the 300 pound stick to swing with. This is love, not demolition or rocket science. I know because I’ve done rocket science and had more success with demolition. We have certainly all done our part to demolish our own love lives.

I’ve observed that men seem to fall in love right away or not at all while women seem to need time to grow to love someone. Regardless, it can be hard to please a partner when they’ve already decided your future with them before getting to understand you. The fundamental difference and obstacle we seem to have to overcome is the communication gap: men and women simply communicate differently. Add in each person’s emotional baggage and it’s no wonder we don’t even begin to understand each other and ultimately part ways before realizing each others’ true potential. Everyone wants that one special person but sometimes it takes more than one person to unlock all of you.

The thing about dating is you must have a sense of who you are as an individual going in because a bad relationship will spin you around and push everything onto you creating baggage that would rival Princess Vespa’s match set in Spaceballs. At some point, we have all destroyed that new relationship based on the baggage we carry from past experiences. Of course, rarely do we see those failures as our fault. With baggage, we push people away rather than let them in. It’s one thing to be picky, choosy, and not tolerate bad behavior, but it’s another thing to act based upon past transgressions that have nothing to do with the current person in your life other than to remind you of what happened before. Then again, the truth is we all have baggage and take out on the new one what the last ones did to us. Sometimes, I think it’s better to be able to say I live baggage free than drama free.

We've all been with shitty partners so you can’t always judge someone for choosing a bad partner. It’s not their fault the one they chose turned out so bad, but a red flag definitely goes up when a pattern of bad choices emerges. There is a reason that the same things happen repeatedly and eventually you have to realize it has nothing to do with the other people since the one commonality is you. It can be a mind trip dealing with people who are coming off bad relationship experiences. The important thing to discover is how they dealt with and overcame their negative experiences to learn, change, grow, and evolve after their mistakes or lack thereof.

I came to a realization this spring that I too had my baggage. I was fixated on having certain things be a certain way, the same way they were with the one I loved before. I didn’t have the patience or foresight to realize that I was judging my new relationships based on stale criteria. While I was eager to get our new relationship, experiences, and feelings to be as good as I had known before, I was really trying to relive the glory days and couldn’t accept that my game had changed. Naturally, my new partners were never comfortable living in someone else’s shadow that I never fully realized I was casting. My frustrations got to the point where less and less needed to be done to set off my negative reactions. Now, I've learned you have to keep an open mind to create new and better experiences because you can’t love the same way with everyone.

Encumbered by baggage, some people can’t move on; they can’t fly free. So people tend to stick to what they know but then wonder why the same things keep happening to them over and over again. There is only stagnation in playing it safe. The ability to know and control all is not as great as it sounds. We need challenges and obstacles in life to learn from, to overcome so we can make our lives better. Baggage forms when we don’t deal with the root cause of our problems and negative experiences. Baggage becomes a burden, a hindrance and inhibits us from taking the most from new experiences, new relationships because we fear the past and how it made us feel. Truthfully, there is little to gain in numbing ourselves to the world because of hurt from past failures. So we can choose to retreat to what we know and is familiar, but in doing so we have to settle for and become accepting of less.

I feel life was simpler when I wasn’t romantically involved with women. Life was easier, better even. I’ve sometimes wished I could go back to when there were no past hurts, no games, and no baggage that influenced so strongly. Back then, I didn’t need anyone and my love was pure. But I don’t think it’s possible because that naiveté, that innocence is lost. We all have baggage, but why do we allow it to linger and adversely affect our potential to love and be loved? Maxwell says it best, “you can make it disappear, all you got to do is just raise up, face up, stay up.” We can all shed our baggage to fly free and it starts with forgiving and loving ourselves. I’ve grown to focus on positive lessons and see each experience as unique. So looking back, each woman I’ve been with has ultimately taught me something about women, love, and myself.

We have to decide for ourselves if it’s better to play it safe and take familiar and comfortable or continue to take a risk for something amazing. If you fail, you can dust yourself off and try again once you let go of hurt and move forward. In love, there is always the risk of getting hurt again, but no risk, no reward. Life is a constant process that takes time, and time heals all wounds. Just remember that life is hard enough, so there’s no reason to live yours with a 500 pound gorilla on your back.