Love in All Good Things

I’m only now starting to realise just how much love I have been surrounded by during the past year. I feared it would all end with the end of the tour, but somehow I’ve been welcomed into a new spring of love by (mostly) new people, and something about this past Saturday was absolutely magical as it dawned upon me.

It’s hard to describe any of it, or even to talk about it, impossible to explain. I don’t really even understand what’s happening or how it’s happening or why, but maybe the universe is being kind enough to make up to me for all the shit years I’ve had recently where there’s been no love at all, where I’ve been abandoned and betrayed and left behind or been the one forced to leave. When I think about my life prior to a year ago, I’m overwhelmed by how miserable it was. What was I thinking to allow myself to live that way? I know a lot of what happened was beyond my control, which was part of the problem, but still. I have no idea how I endured it, year after year, without any of this warm, wonderful glow that now seems permanently wrapped around me.

It’s not, of course, as though everything in my life is suddenly perfect. It isn’t remotely. But wonderful, glorious things keep happening and I can feel the healing as though I’m watching a wound close over and a scar turn white and then invisible. This time a year ago I was completely broken. Tomorrow I was heading on a pilgrimage to Africa that I dreaded with every cell in my body (for good reason, as it turned out), and I am so pathetically grateful that I don’t have to live through that again. After I got back, though.....wow.

I’ve spent most of my life longing to travel because, I’ve realised, I wanted to escape. I was never happy where I was, even when I spent more time living in hotels in exotic countries than I did my own house, which has been my lifestyle for the past decade or so. Now, suddenly, I’m learning what it’s like to be happy exactly where I am, and it’s thrilling. I love having a life that I actually want to be here for.

So much is yet to come. I have no idea what I’m going to do or how I’m going to do it, but things continue to develop in ways I could never have imagined. Usually I prefer to have specific goals and strict plans and procedures, and partly I feel irresponsible, derelict, for not having them right now. But how can I tie myself down to anything right now when new vistas continue to open up around me and opportunities I never dreamed existed are suddenly there right in front of me?

It was hard, this weekend, when my (former but not yet officially ex)husband brought home some other woman from the pub at 2am on Saturday night…but then I’d spent the previous two days (actually, rather longer) having an intense ‘love affair’ with a man I think is the most beautiful being I have ever seen, inside and out, so I hardly had a right to object. The truth is, E has given me more love in the brief few weeks I’ve known him than my husband ever did in the six years we’ve been together, a fact which rather horrifies me.

It continues to amaze me, what love feels like. How did I get it SO wrong with Will? Was I in THAT bad of a place in my head that I thought the way he behaved towards me was acceptable, that I accepted the way he made me feel? It sickens me that I let him anywhere near me.

With one single glance, E makes me feel better than I ever did with Will. And yet we have, and always will have, a completely platonic relationship–but that’s not what I mean. Sex connections with people and love connections with people often bear no relation to each other. I can’t actually remember how many sexual connections I had with people in the ghastly aftermath of Jordan’s death, when I just wanted something to make me feel, until eventually I realised that no matter what they did to me, they never touched me at all. Not inside. Not where it mattered. Not in any way that warmed my frozen centre.

In all those years, I don’t think I fell in love with anybody, or felt love for or from anybody. I think you can fall in love without it being about sex. You can fall in love with people you’ll never have or ever want a sexual relationship with, and the relationship you end up having can be so very much more satisfying. That is something I have learned during the past year. Actually, sex can fuck it up - witness the very complicated relationship I’ve been having with someone with whom I’m in love, and he’s also in love with me, but there’s a sexual element which ruins it since he’s married and it all kind of goes to shit, and that’s not the kind of relationship I want with him anyway, but I think it’s fucked him up in the head, the confusion of it. God, that’s a confusing sentence all of its own, which sums the situation up pretty well.

Why is the world so confused about love? Why do we equate love with sex and possession and need?

I love so many people right now that I couldn’t even begin to make a list. And anyway, that list would just get added to almost every day, given the current trajectory of my life… It’s wonderfully freeing to love like this and to receive love like this. I could never have imagined it before.

Part of me would like to go back a year (okay, eleven months, so after I returned from Africa), so I could relive all the joys to come, but the rest of me is so damn excited to be where I am today, so enthusiastic about whatever new joys may be to come that sometimes it’s hard to sleep because I’m so eager for morning. I still suffer paralysing panic attacks, and some days are still hard, and no doubt that will continue, but.....

I am surrounded by love. And I wouldn’t change a thing.