I had learned to love another with my soul. I'm not sure if learned would be the apt descript of what took place, it wasn't a structured event as such, it began as friendly and flowed into an organic birth of overwhelming love for another person. And when that fell apart, in terribly painful ways, as Marcus Mumford expressed in White Blank Page, I was pushed to the brink. Picking myself up from that desert floor left me in the midst of a painfully strange metamorphosis.
I used to be able to bounce back from breakups.
Whatever resiliency there was seems to have yielded to a stubbornly
rooted ambivalence about dating and ever opening up again. If loving another with your soul wasn't good enough, the world made no sense to me. I found myself at a crossroads filled with conflict. In one direction, the idea of opening up and caring about someone again that deeply was impossible - unspeakable pain. In another, there would be solitude.
The definition of ambivalence as taken from Merriam-Webster:
1: simultaneous and contradictory attitudes or feelings {as attraction and repulsion} toward an object, person, or action
2: a) continual fluctuation {as between one thing and its opposite}
b) uncertainty as to which approach to follow
I'm not sure that I will ever date again, or marry. The Lord knows I need to heal first. Unreservedly I still think romance is special, and hearing stories of couples who have been together a long time always makes me happy. For now, I'm not wanting to date, I'm running away from the idea as if it were fire.
And standing still. Maybe someday.
