everything changes color in the sun
March 09, 2005 � 10:20 p.m.

All I know is that I loved her once...it stayed with me all my life...and it colored everything.

I just heard that quote on TV, and I have been turning it around and around in my head, falling into the melody of it, lost in the meaning of it, enchanted by the purpose of it. I say it to myself over and over, jubilant that someone else said it...because in a nutshell...it describes how I feel for him perfectly.

All I know is that I loved him once...
Once...seemingly another lifetime ago...I met a gangly boy with dark skin and big eyes and the moment he first touched me gently, I fell in love. Novelists pen love like this with hollow intentions of wanting nothing more than to make us dream, but I lived it...I touched it...I knew that kind of love...because everything about him breathed love, pure and honest and naked and unyielding. He gave me love in it's truest form. No one had ever given me that. No one has since.

...it stayed with me all my life...
So many times over the years, he would nonchalantly drift into my thoughts and sometimes come bombarding back into my life, and every time I would feel the same twinge in my stomach that I felt after that first touch. The intensity never waned or wavered a bit. It would merely slumber...silently rolling under my skin and behind my eyes just waiting for the perfect moment to accost my conscious and make me long for him terribly...for his scent, his breath, his aura. No matter how much time passed, he was always fresh on my mind with fond daydreams and memories attached to the music of him name. I never forgot a thing about him. I never let go of how it was to be loved like that.

...and it colored everything.
I have fallen backwards into nonsensical relationships with boys in men's clothing, and no matter how much I enjoyed their touch and banter, there was always something missing. I just assumed it was me...and it was me...because I was never really IN those relationships. I was detached from them, watching these men with narrowed, curious eyes and an even more narrowed heart. The "love" I had for them was just a facsimile of the real thing...a copy of a copy of a copy of an idea of what I thought love might be like from all the books and movies and love songs that I crammed my brain with. But now I see that I am at fault just as they were, because they were always doomed from the start...because they weren't who I really wanted...and I resented them for not being him and hated myself for settling for something less than I deserved. I deserve the love that was given so freely to me when I was a foolish young girl. I deserve to be happy and fulfilled.

I deserve him.

I didn't feel like I deserved him before. I always felt lackluster and unworthy in his arms because I hated my own skin and couldn't understand why he adored it so much. We tumbled through so many needless mistakes, he and I, and we are much changed by the world and our experiences in it, but one thing remains miraculously unchanged; the love we have for each other. Our love has diminished one bit. In fact, it somehow grew. With all the time and space and absence and other loves and circumstances, our love managed to find a place to hide and secretly grow inside each of us, and now that we have found each other again, it is as if no time has passed between the last time he touched me and now. "I feel I love you like I loved you when I first fell in love with you. How can that be. How can something so perfect still exist in a heart so polluted?" he whispered last night before we said goodbye. My throat closed with emotion and he said for me not to try to answer before sighing and quietly saying he loved me. I hung up and cried all the way home. Sometimes its so overwhelming all I can manage to do is cry.

Something this certain only comes along once in a lifetime.
I was born to love this man.

What is a brain anyway, when in comparison to the heart?