Love in 4D

I've come to a realization. Love is complicated. It's a mind-bender, right? No one in the history of man has ever said that before, right? Yeah, we all know that Love can mess with our heads. It whispers at the back of our brains, fills our hearts with longing, makes us do things that we shouldn't with people we shouldn't.

But I've had a personal revelation. Love is complicated. Love doesn't turn on and off like a light-switch. It isn't on a line graph or a pie chart or a bar graph. It isn't even linear. I can't say, "Oh, I love him this much." I can't even put down that graph and say that one side is pure love and the other point is the biggest hate, with kinda love somewhere in the middle. It doesn't work that way.

It spreads out like a big spread-y mess. I'd say it was a spill, but even then you don't get the full picture. So I was thinking, love is 4D at least. It doesn't just lay there for you to pick out points on and say, "Oh, this much. This is how much I love you." That means it's bigger than 2D. It isn't just 3D where you can say, "This is how much I love you, AND it fills me up this much." It also spans the course of time moving backward and forward through memory, time, presence, filling out the scope beyond our world experiences into something deeper and more. Even the bad shit fills out more than we want it too.

You can't say, "Oh, damn, I hate that guy but I used to love him," because no matter what, there is always going to be some part of you that fell for him. We deny it by saying things like, "I didn't know that part until later," or "I've grown. I don't want that anymore." Sure, there are aspects of that stuck in there, but there's more. That "part" is the yang of the yin. You liked aspects of it until you decided that the balancing negative of the same aspect was beyond tolerating. Love isn't as clear as yin and yang though, is it? If it were, we wouldn't make the series of trials and errors. We'd look, evaluate, and either take a pass or take it on.

I hate that I'm weak enough to say, "I still love this about him. I'll miss this about him. God, it makes me hurt to be without this part of him." But I'm strong enough to say, "Those other things hurt me worse. Those other things sting and damage and destroy. That even while he's holding me and giving me that miss-able stuff, he's cracking the foundation of that beauty by also being this."

Maybe I should never get so strong that I forget the beauty of my weaknesses because I DO value those things. But maybe I should never lose my strength to let my weaknesses be the master of my heart.

Love is 4D, spilling, filling, grasping, scaling up and back on the memory and doubts, fears and feelings, time and sacred moments. It's beautiful and it sucks. It's easy and it's hard. It's forever and it's never over soon enough. It forms you and it destroys you. And if, from the wreckage, you can take the pieces and make something better, glue it together with the purified ache you are left with, hopefully you will burnish it instead of making the same choices to re-crack your newly repaired self.

So until it quits hurting, I have to trust that it will provide joy in the future. A show of hands please, who else hates the in-between stage?