Loss, Life and Love

It startles me when I find out that certain friends are not as happy as I thought they were, or made them out to be in my mind. The grass can seem greener in anyone else's yard, true, but really, there are people that have more angst, less love, more hurt or broken dreams than I had imagined.

I try not to be that girl that thinks, Well, no one has it as hard, I lost my father. Those moments come perhaps when someone me or my sister knows who is ill, sick, complaining maybe, of something we don't find to be as tragic, as deadly, as the cancer our father fought. But I remember that everyone's pain or ailments are their own, they don't know differently and they still take their own stuff, their own problems on as just that-their own. Who am I to judge who has it harder or worse?

Lately I have been happier than I thought possible for this time of year. Yes, I have the "moments". The sucker-punch, come out of nowhere moments that only hard memories and the complete loss of family can create. But for the most part, especially after a tough November, I am okay.

I have friends who's dreams are lost. I know mine are (for now). But for some of my friends that have been steadily working, climbing, and searching in different ways, the reality is just as harsh, maybe harsher, for them as it has been for me being home for years I didn't plan. Careers or no careers, life happens, flies by, we age, we get lost. We lose battles and we lose love.

We also lose sight of what we have.

I sometimes look adoringly at my friends who are in love. I find it interesting to see where we all are, see even those who don't know where they are. I wonder if there are only three kinds of love. There is the new love. Not the just-met-him/her-last-night love, but the love of a newer relationship that you see in flight. It's going somewhere, you both feel it and people see it in you, hear it in your voice, that you are in love, that you do love.

There is on-going love, or maintained love. The kind where the two people have been together so long but there is still that spark, still that feeling of newness even when dishes take precedent over dates. Neither of you are going anywhere, no one is leaving and it's all happening the way it should.

The last kind of love, is the hardest kind. It's secret, it's unconventional, it's spoken but mostly it's not. You wait for moments that don't always come with a pretty little bow. There are excuses or reasons but there is always passion. Pining for the person when maybe the other is not. It's complicated, crazy or maybe short-lived love. I have been in that third category too much the last few years but it isn't all bad, I won't let it be. I have had men make me smile a smile I didn't think I had in me anymore. Where simply hearing my name from their lips melts me.

I have stopped dwelling on the possibility that the marriage card may never be in the cards for me again. Instead, I have marveled at the joy, really told myself to realize, the ecstatic memories I have built from my unconventional loves. Even the one who doesn't know I pine.

At this time of year, it is easy to be lost. We rush, we purchase, we briefly catch up. I am trying to take stock. That it isn't that bad, we are not as out of touch, out of our place as we think, and sometimes love beats out other kinds of loss.