Hand Out Your Heart Again – A Lesson For Hopeless Romantics

We have these moments when we’re in love, where we point out “I think that is where I lost her. That’s where I lost it all”. Your stomach churns at the thought, and you get a little bit dizzy. This is a person you love who probably won’t ever say that word again to you. This is torture to you.

It isn’t okay, as all of your friends tell you it will be. It’s like you’re on stage, and the curtain has fell on top of you. There isn’t an easy way to lift it, you just have to crawl backwards into the dark or forward into the next opportunity. We’ll talk about the forward crawl.

Love and intimacy are different to us. We crave the dinner where we share our thoughts about the world. We crave the moments where we just spend time staring into each others eyes, lost in the sea of green, brown, or blue that is unique to us all. We crave the moments where the world peels back and it seems for a split second that the only thing in the universe is the two of us. It feels like we’re in space, looking at all the tiny gleaming lights, and each of the stars is an idea that we can gather into a reality. The stars replace the synapses in our brains, shining and bursting every time they’re brought up again.

Thats the sort of love we crave.

There is one thing that always seems to get lost in my mind when we lose that love. When lovers misplace the ability to care for my heart, we long for something more when it’s finished. we feel as though we’ve given the world, and received a lump of coal for Christmas. Like the stars somehow turned off their glow for only us.

My last love had all that. We would spend hours upon hours delving into each others minds to find what the other thought. We would sit there and write songs and poems, trading off every other line. We would create vast plans full of adventure and fun. Then one day, the synapses just stopped. The connections seemed forcibly severed and my mind cut off. My heart ached as it was taken from her hands, and set back into mine.

Why do we do all of this? Why do we put our hearts in the hands of someone who very well may toss it aside at any moment? We do it because love is an unconscious decision. You don’t actively love, or feel the need to show love to the other person. It never really crosses your mind. You just do.

Love will leak from you, like a broken faucet that you never want to fix. It’s more than okay to let it just sit there, and pool on the kitchen floor. The more water that leaks, the better it is. It’ll spill, and spill, and spill until you’ve got an insurmountable ocean in front of you. That is what love feels like.

It is a terrifying feeling when you come to realize how large and powerful your love for that person is. While this may seem scary at first glance, there is someone holding your hand the entire time. It’s why old couples become so devastated at the loss of their loved one to the point of not wanting to live in this world anymore. They still feel that ocean, but their hand isn’t being held anymore.

Somewhere along the line I confuse sex with love. Sex still feels like the expression of love that it should be; it still feels like a moment of connection with this person that you do not want to spend your nights without. Sometimes, it doesn’t stay that way. Sometimes the stars are covered by dark clouds or sink into the muck of our minds swamp. When the stars that are your synapses stop firing you unknowingly replace them with an animalistic need. It’s a connection that you remember and KNOW you can get back to. You KNOW it’s there and it is an option, but you’re no longer feeling the moments that brought you together. You’re no longer swimming through the eyes, you’re no longer able to just peel back the world. You lose what made you two great in the first place. You will still think that it it’s there somewhere deep down, but right now your ocean is covered by all the muck that got in the way in the first place.

If you can sort it out through the muck, and bring the stars back out, you’ve got something stronger than anything else. Do not let it go. Those lights will never fade.

We will recover from this of course, if we can’t sort our love out of the muck. It’s hard, but we move through it. We’ve gotta peel back the world on our own again for a while. Sink into our own thoughts, and just swim in them alone. We’ll share again, because that is our very nature. It will take time to be as honest as the last relationship was, but thats okay. We move on, just to put our heart back in another person’s hands. When you become afraid of that ocean again, remember that you’ve got a hand to hold. We’re capable creatures with an unrivaled ability to bounce back from anything. You can do this.

Your faucet will leak again.