I’m oddly detached from my emotions. Or perhaps a lack of necessity for human dependancy may be more accurate in describing it. I’ve never wanted or needed to depend on anyone, and even more strongly have never desired for anyone to depend on me for anything. I’m fascinated by people, but only from a sort of abstract perspective, not as if I were a cell of the same nucleus, looking in. I think the term used frequently for this is selfish. I’ve never felt terribly selfish. I’m willing to give, nearly anything. I just don’t think I’ve ever been inspired enough to give. For the longest time I was convinced that I would never become married. I’ve had relationships but they were never out of passion or romance. As much as it is hurtful to say, I always got involved in a relationship because I was bored and wanted someone who would fulfill the physical needs I had (especially as hormones raged and calmed inside of me). Even my most recent bout of feelings for a person was driven by my “love drought” as I’ve come to endearingly refer to it. She was sweet and kind and loving. That sounded like a good deal, so I created heightened sensitivity to everything she did, making myself believe that she was one-of-a-kind, forcing myself to want to be in love. I was trying to prove not that she was lovable, or that she deserved love, but that I was capable of really loving her. For as long as I’d been able to really grapple with the concept of love I’ve been afraid that I couldn’t muster up enough interest to truly love someone, to sacrificially stay focused enough to love. This is why I’ve cheated on every girlfriend I’ve had, and gone through friends and groups and types of friends as if it were of no consequence. It’s because to me, in my cold and indifferent heart it really does have little consequence. I can play the caring guy card well, especially with friends who make me feel good. It’s almost evolutionary, my chances of survival are increased when they are around, so I do what I need to to keep them around. I don’t know anyone else like this, and could for the longest time never see and rhyme or reason to the gaping hole inside my body where my compassion and heart should lie. This purring cold monster inside me that is disturbingly complacent to the presence of people in my life was the key to my realization that I could never really love somebody, the way they wanted. I could never care enough. Marriage became something I pitied then. Something I could learn to have a distaste for. This worked marvelously, and I really did grow to despise not only the holy junction of marriage, but the general need to be completed by another weak failing human being. A character in a George Bernard Shaw play summed it up as if he has scraped his lines off the surface of my cemented heart. His character Tanner says “Marriage is to me apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of my soul, violation of my manhood, sale of my birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat. I shall decay like a thing that has served its purpose and is done with; I shall change from a man with a future to a man with a past; I shall see in the greasy eyes of all the other husbands their relief at the arrival of a new prisoner to share their ignominy. The young men will scorn me as one who has sold out: to the women I, who have always been an enigma and a possibility, shall be merely somebody else’s property—and damaged goods at that: a secondhand man at best.” I was elated to learn that I wasn’t alone, there was hope, or rather contentment, in knowing I was alone in wanting to be alone. Alas, Tanner eventually gets married, and unhappily lives his socially acceptable life. My new outlook on marriage and my capacity to love came where all good outlooks are born–in church. This past Sunday, I was standing in the low lit church beginning to truly try and channel myself to the divine. Not in a seance kind of way. But, in a true and worshipful dialogue. A intimate whisper in the ear of the divine. As I full heartedly mumbled the words “you are my King”, I realized, as if for the first time, that what I was singing was true. I was singing to the King, for the King, by the power of the King. As I sang, heat began to radiate in my legs, as if flames had shot up from the ground into steel hot spikes that ran into my legs. It burned up and down my calf stopping and ramming to the crease of my knee. I thought my legs were going to give in, and fail to ever hold my weight again.They continued to buckle, to give in to the overwhelming heat melting the muscle under the skin. Just as I thought it was too much to bear, I was forced to acknowledge another part of my body that was taken over by sudden pressure. My heart. My physical heart began to beat an ill rhythm. I felt the presence of my heart, red and full like that of a functioning loving person. A whole full heart pumping hard, as if I had been resuscitated. It punched against my chest, beating to say I. Am. In. Here. The beating message traveled up to my throat, at which point I felt the pressure against the back of my throat and realized I couldn’t speak anymore. I clicked my tongue against the base of my mouth, trying to sing the words of the songs I longed to sing. The heat and pain in my legs began winding toward the base of my stomach while the clog in my throat and the filled chunks of my heart began to drip down to the same place. I began to realize what was happening to my body. What was shifting inside me. My physical and spiritual components had married and were sending me a inconspicuous message. It lightly touched my ears and grabbed me knowingly by the hand, as if to gently prepare me for what it was about to say. You are in love. You can love. You will love. This feeling, the feelings I’d only briefly encountered and brushed swiftly away, were feelings of love toward my Savior. I had been wooed, and won. I was irrationally and unequivocally in a passionate love with the Creator. As he breathed the world into existence, so he breathed love into my deflated heart. It suddenly became clear that if He has willed, one day I will love someone, I have the capacity to love someone. I will be passionately and inordinately obsessed with the object of my desire, the one and only one that He created to fit into me, and I in her. I don’t have to feel empty because I haven’t felt love for people the way I desire too. I’m not a cold hearted creation without the capacity to love. There is one out there who will be all I’ve ever needed to love. This isn’t the way it works for everybody, or nearly anybody as far as I understand. But, this crazy boiling passion I feel is lying at the base of my gut waiting to give everything it has sacrificially to someone. I will feel the need to protect, to be depended on, to nurture, to give my very life. I will know the art of love and dependency and will think about her before myself, and will trust her even when I shouldn’t. I will be crazily and wonderfully in love, just as I have been, with my heart at the center, crazily and wonderfully made. I don’t have to waste my time pretending to love fading styles or trends of girls. I will patiently and passionately cultivate the passion that is in me, and will one day understand who it is the cultivation is for, and as the feeling radiates through my body as they did in church, my heart will no longer acknowledge my ability to love as it beats I.Am.In.Here. but it will slowly and with a proverbial smile, beat She.Is.In.Here

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