Love

I used to not believe in love. Not just romantic love, but love of all sorts. I never understood it very well and I feel like I have spent my entire life trying to understand love (am still working on it). The relationships I saw, the way people interacted, in real life did not match what I saw in TV, in movies. I didn't understand what love felt like, though I am sure I must have felt it everyday. No one in my family ever said they loved each other. The only thing I had ever heard with regard to love was that I didn't love my mom if I did something that made her angry (or hurt).

One day, during my adolescence, my mom got mugged at knife point. With the real fear of losing my mom looming in close, I realized that I loved her, loved her so much that I was terrified of losing her. It was an odd feeling, to be both terrified and incredibly happy at the same time. It was wonderful, I found love. It was doubly wonderful that my mom came home unscathed.

Now that I found love, I wanted to understand it more, understand why I missed it before. These are some of the things I see. Love is helping someone cut her dinner because her arm hurts, helping someone clean himself after he have soiled his pants, or offering to clean her bathroom because you want her to have to do one less thing today. Love can be fearful too- loving someone so much and being so afraid of losing them that you don't want to let them out of your sight. Love can be angry too- mad that the other person has so much power over you and so you hurt them too. Some people have tried to argue that those last two aren't love. I'm not sure it is so easy to separate those emotions from each other. Yes, there is a line between domestic abuse and the fear and anger that can also grow out of love. However, love can be both selfish and selfless, not always at the same time, but sometimes they do coincide.

So I love someone very very much but he is in a lot of emotional pain, and has been for a very long time. This makes it hard to love him. Though we can chat, talk, laugh and share in fun moments, the pain is always there, riding close to the surface. It makes it hard for me to be around him a lot. He hurts a lot and as a result, I hurt with him. But I can't do anything to make that pain go away. It is just something he has to work on by himself. As with any illness, it happens inside that person's body and there isn't much you can do about it. So sometimes love hurts a lot and you just have to live with it.

sick

sick and am taking off from work today. though in all honesty, the job i have is the kind where it doesn't matter whether or not I go into work at a prescribed time (unless it is for a meeting) as long as I get the work done. coughing up the yellow green phlegm and am trying to do my public duty by avoiding people. Don't want to be a vector.
it also means I get to stay home and watch TV....most likely will spend a good portion of the day watching old star trek-next generation episodes. I'd so like to take a nap though- something I can't ever really get my body into doing.