Love.

Here’s what The Beatles had to say about Love: “Love, love love… you can learn how to play the game. It’s easy”. 

Is it? I can tell you that I think about it all of the time, I write about it a hell of a lot, and I throw “I love you” around like it’s my job. To friends, family members, random cats and dogs on the street… So, there’s definitely ‘that’ kind of ‘love’. Then there’s the kind of love without one proper definition. The kind that mystifies us. As Mary-Kate and Ashley Olson’s characters in the mediocre but heartwarming film, ‘It Takes Two’ say: “It’s that can't eat, can't sleep, reach for the stars over the fence, world series kind of love.”

I think ‘that’ kind of ‘love’ makes you do things you never thought you would do. It makes you take risks. Please excuse all of my romantic comedy references here but, in the film ‘French Kiss’, Timothy Hutton calls up his current fiancé to tell her he’s fallen in love with another woman. The only way that he can describe his state of euphoria is by saying that he could “urinate with someone standing right in back of him”.  In other words, he could do anything. In a situation where he would normally be scared, he let’s go. 

I’m not defining love here; I just want to talk about it. I’m the kind of girl who loves ‘Love’ so much that I would buy it in a store if I could. The problem is, I have no idea what it looks like. If it was an object, I wouldn’t know its shape, size or color but I’m starting to have a good idea of what it feels like. Someone once told me that I had never been in love before. That hurt. The people closest to me will tell you that I live for falling in love and I’ve attempted one too many times. The truth is, even though I’ve made last minute trips overseas and stood outside a boy’s apartment with flowers, I did those things for the idea of love… not for the love I felt for them. 

When I write about it, the character’s love epiphany is usually followed by a chase to the airport or a surprise visit to the one they want and need. So what I’m thinking is that love is the Gatorade that fuels the marathon. It’s this wild energy that swings back and forth between you and that other human. It’s not just about you and it’s not something you can ask for and get right away. It's caring, it's sharing, it's passion, it's vulnerability, it's a lot of things rolled into one and it's born from your experiences with that other person. It does happen when you least expect it and it does drive you crazy. Love has a fighting quality about it. It’s not easy. It’s definitely fantastic. It’s going to pull you in all sorts of directions. When it’s present and you can recognize it, you’d be stupid to let it go. 

For fun… here is the soundtrack to my chase for love. 

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A Man Called Marlboro

People say that love is a drug. It’s addicting, intoxicating and a large amount of it can be dangerous enough to cause an overdose. If you part with love or love parts with you, your head and heart go through a sort of mourning period. If you’ve ever seen the end of a relationship, then you know that feeling of withdrawal. Lonely nights where you absolutely need a fix and the fix is that person’s face, voice, body or just their presence. You yearn for the feeling when love was running through your veins. It was a high… and being down gives you the uncomfortable shakes. 

I recently quit smoking. Sure, it’s about the tenth attempt but I actually wanted to stop this time around, as opposed to someone making me, or me just quitting without the belief that I could actually do this for my health and add on the years instead of cutting them down. 

The thing that has actually helped me the most and kept me from sprinting to my local tobacco shop is looking at this stage in my life as me going through a little thing I like to call HEARTBREAK. 

I was in a relationship with a man called Marlboro. We’ve been on and off for about twelve years now. I’m twenty-four, so that makes me the tender age of twelve years old when I first met him. Sad and scary, I know. But it’s the truth and the more I tell myself the truth, the more I realize how long I was being abused. I was also abusing myself for staying with him. Things were good for a while. They were pretty great, actually. I thought I knew the definition of ‘cool’ when I was with him. The kind of cool that movies introduced you to. Marlboro was there for me when I was stressed and hand in hand when I was having a great night out on the town. What more could I ask for? But everyone around me started to say that he was bad for me and that I should leave him. I couldn’t bring him around my family and some friends sneered when I took him out to social gatherings. I kept telling myself that love stands above everything else and, no matter what, I would stick with him. A lot of time went by and people close to me just dealt with the fact that Marlboro was here to stay. I will admit, some days he really slowed me down and made me feel worse than better. At a certain point, we became so comfortable that it seemed pointless to end it… even when we hit rock bottom. Anyway, after several years I started to see things in the light of day. I relied on him too much and, on top of that, he started to give me a bad taste in my mouth. I didn’t like wanting and needing Marlboro that much. So, one day I ended it. I ended it and I broke my own heart doing it. 

Sometimes I think about him and how he would know exactly how to comfort me when I felt like throwing a fit and screaming in a public place. Sometimes I think it would be nice to have him with me when I go out with my friends. But I know he wasn’t good in the end. I know he would turn his back on me one day and hurt me so I thought it would be better to feel this small pain now instead of a bigger pain later on down the road. Every day I tell myself, “You’re going to be okay. You don’t need him. You’re much better without him.” And every day I forget about him a little bit more. With the turn of a few calendar pages, I’m sure that I will have completely erased him from my memory.

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