Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like "Maybe we should just be friends" or "How very perceptive" turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love. - Neil Gaiman

I realized recently in talking to a friend that I've spent most of my twenties being single. Its funny how it just kind of happened. I didn't plan for it to be that way, hell, I never really thought it could even sort out that way, but it did. And I never really became fully aware of it until last month. It dawned on me like a whole new reality I hadn't known about, even though I was the one living it out at the time.

And you can't go back. You can never go back.

That's the subtle sting of any reality related to this life - they are all so finite. They all sit there and silently tell you that some day, you too shall pass. The end is absolutely coming for us all.

In a sense, then, I suppose that even finding someone to stumble through life with would have a bit of the same sense of finite wrapped into it. Perhaps even more so - you get the love and joy and other wonderful things about companionship, but the knowledge that one day one of you is going to grieve the other person. I remember my pastor once put it along the lines of "death is knowing that one face at the dinner table will watch all the rest be buried."

But even that, losing your love to the grave, is the bittersweet temporal experience for the Christian, who sheds tears with a smile knowing that the day of reuniting is not far off.

I think what I have the most trouble with is the threat of lost love in this life - that love might leave you for reasons other than death.

After so many years of walking this world on your own, your heart builds a little box around it, after a fashion. You're not challenged by people who know you well enough to push the right buttons at the right time. You're not often called out when you stray a little too far. You don't often find yourself in the position to struggle with another person, be it over a sunroof left open in a snowstorm or whether life begins at conception. In the box, your heart doesn't have to worry about any of those things. Of course, as with most things, someone before me has put it more eloquently:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. - Clyde Staples Lewis

And so I've realized that trying to place my self in a state of relationship - an effort one might say I've been more actively pursuing over the past few months - is a matter of taking my heart out of the box. You have to set it on the table between the two of you and then sit there with your hands on your lap and watch what the other person decides to do. And it takes a very, very long time. And sometimes you put it back in the box and you know you're going to have to start all over again. It is not at all an easy process.

It is, however, a good thing that I am aware of this at the moment, because I'm still desperately early in this process. I don't really belong to anyone yet, although I wouldn't mind if I did in the near future. Being in Africa and not being sure where I'll be living or working a few months from now doesn't help smooth the process out much, but I digress. The point is that I am, if anything at all, in the earliest stages of anything at all, and it doesn't take much to know that things likely will not get easier. The opening up and the sharing and the trusting - so very much the trusting - the more invested one becomes, the greater the risk. I struggle so much with trusting my heart to another. Trust is one of my big three qualifications for a person that I would belong to.

I think the risk, however, is one of the things that really brings a sort of roller coaster thrill to the possibility of love. There's a danger there, a flirting with gravity, of a sort. I was climbing in Great Falls National Park this past weekend with friends. Nothing serious - no harness and ropes, but enough to make you careful about where you put your hands and feet. Love is so very much that feeling - its exhilarating, it makes you feel most alive, and yet only so because there's the possibility of exactly the opposite, right there, all the time. To love anything at all is to realize that it might be lost.

I know love is a decision, not something that just happens to you. But I'll say it all the same - I want to fall in love. I want to throw myself headlong into it and hope things work out in the end. And if they don't, I want to work through heartbreak, again. If I do, I know I'm much better prepared for it, this time. And if I don't, so much the better. But what I don't want, anymore, what I really fear, I suppose, is any more of this complacent neutrality.

I want to get rid of the box, for good. And, in a sense, I think I'm glad that its not an easy process.