Have you ever seen Crazy, Stupid, Love? I didn’t really know what the movie was about when I sat down to watch it over the weekend. There were so many story lines that all ended up converging at the end to talk about one central story…the one true love…and whether it existed.
Sometimes you discover that love at a young age. Sometimes you meet them in high school. Sometimes you’re just going through life, thinking love was all a joke…and then it happens to you. You meet that one true love.
The way Steve Carell described it at the end, actually had me in tears. Sometimes you’ll find that one true love, marry them, have a family with them…and then you end up breaking up. But if that’s your soulmate…you fight for them, because you’ve loved them every single day of your life since you found them.
I wanted to throw my pillow at the TV screen and ask, “Well, what happens when the soulmate commits suicide when you’re still just teenagers? What do you do after that?”
Yep, I was upset about that. I mean…I was really upset. I was huffing and puffing and cursing under my breath for the next couple of hours. Then I saw my horoscope show up in my inbox a few hours later and it said not to take any relationship advice that day, because whoever was giving it to me that day was not right. {Just love how that horoscope is always so dead on.}
It wasn’t until 24 hours later that I started to think about that 13 year old that was in love with his 17 year old babysitter. He was convinced that she was his one true love…no matter how many times she resisted him because she was in love with someone else (she had a huge crush on his dad).
The youth thing really came into play on why she was not interested in this 13 year old boy.
I don’t know why I thought of that story the next day, but it reminded me of something I saw last week.
I was standing in a room with a bunch of other people, when this guy (that I’ve had some problems with) walked into the next room. He paused at the doorway to look at me through the mirror reflecting back into the room. I looked up and saw him looking at me…and then I saw how I had shattered him. I had really shattered his heart.
I looked away, because I still feel like he had no right to feel that ‘in love’ with me to begin with. Then again, I had to question what it is that makes people feel that strongly about someone else, especially when the other person just doesn’t feel the same way.
What can easily be pushed aside as just a crush…to that person, it’s more than that…especially when they’re not getting over it.
Is it like that 13 year old boy that was convinced that one day that girl was going to love him? Or is it like me (in present day) who looks at a similar situation I am in and sees that it has become dangerous? He’s crossed the line into a territory where the law could come down on him if he didn’t stop.
Part of me wants to believe that there’s only one true love in this lifetime. The other part of me says it’s not true, because I’ve loved more than one person in this lifetime and I’ve connected with more than just one person in this lifetime.
Sure, I miss my soulmate like crazy, each and every single day. I love him today like I loved him then…but there’s a finality in the moment. He is not here to have or to hold. Till death did we part.
Kevin is actually the reason why I never married and never had children. No one was ever good enough. If I came close to that life, I backed away…NO…let me rephrase that…I RAN LIKE A BAT OUT OF HELL.
If a guy looked at me like he knew I was the one…he got shutdown left and right. Why? He wasn’t Kevin.
There’s probably some psychological mumbo jumbo in there somewhere where I run because I have a fear of falling in love and losing someone in the most horrific way (aka suicide) and then I’m left all alone again. So I’d rather choose to be alone than to deal with someone forcing the universe’s hand and making me live my life out alone anyway. With this option, I have control over the situation, unlike before.
See…I can psychoanalyze this. In truth, I have been psychoanalyzing my life in love since I started writing about Morocco and how I normally would rather choose to be alone than to be in love.
When you’ve spent half of your life in love with someone you can’t hold or touch, especially when this person was your soulmate, you can’t bring yourself to love or fall in love with someone who isn’t that soulmate.
I’ve spent most of this lifetime post-Kevin searching for that same connection I had with him. I met people that I knew from past lifetimes…they had already married someone else and had a family. There were others that you love…but it never works out no matter how many lifetimes you try this over and over again. Then you meet someone new and you feel that same connection you once felt, and maybe it’s a little stronger…but then you feel that urge to run again…to be alone.
As the days start to get closer and closer to my departure date, I’m thinking about running again. This guy would have to chase me down in order to stop me, instead of letting the universe do its will. I’ve been strongly considering other territories like Prague or France…or maybe even the northernmost tip of Morocco where it’s only a 20 minute boat ride to Spain.
Part of me wants to be in New York, the other part…far, far away. So I resolved to finish the book, publish it, and then see where life floated me after that.
I keep thinking about the true lesson I learned while in Morocco. I dont’ think it was the fact that I fell for some random guy…I think it was that I had the capability of loving again. What had been shattered inside had now been made whole. If that means I’m getting married…well, I may change my mind come July, but part of me says that I’m okay with not ever getting married.
Something inside me has changed over these past few months. Driss had this feeling when we spoke about Hamid that I would end up changing my mind about marriage. He told me that it was up to me to decide if I would marry the nomad or not. If I chose not to get married, there were alternatives for me in his country…but to make my life easier, he suggested marriage to a Moroccan man would make my stay easier…especially if I decided to adopt.
There are so many choices being laid out before me, but I feel like I don’t want to be confined to just one home or one country. Maybe I want to keep a home in NY and another in Morocco and another in France, Prague and Italy. Maybe I want to cover international hockey for a little while. Maybe I want to live in Paris for a few months or a few years. Maybe I want to keep a place in NY for when I miss seeing the Devils or the Rangers play. And maybe I want to keep a place in Prague, because I love the damn place and the people there.
Maybe I feel confined in New York City right now and don’t want to feel this way anymore.
And then out of all of this soul searching and questioning what in the hell I want to do in this next adventure…something inside of me remembers an old flame from 12 years ago. I actually went and did something I never do…I Facebook stalked him today. I was curious to know what happened to him.
When I first moved to NYC, I sent him a card to let him know I was in NYC…just in case he wanted to start things up again. He wrote me back and told me that he had decided that he couldn’t wait for me anymore (he thought I was never coming back) so he got married. At the time, he was expecting his first child. He now has two…a boy and a girl.
I looked through his photos…they’re from all over the world. From South America to the Great Wall of China…he was still traveling all over the world, and keeping down the fort with a family back in Washington, DC. I swear he’s still as perfect today as he was back then. Why did I never marry this guy?
He’s the first guy I ran away from. He’s also my biggest regret, because he is actually the one I let get away. After his letter to me telling me that he had married, I thought that maybe I had learned a lesson in all of this…don’t run again…not when it’s love…not when he’s absolutely perfect in every single way. I mean…looking at his picture now, with his gray hair and all…he still makes my heart flutter like he did the first time he jumped onto the same elevator as me.
He wasn’t a soulmate…no, that was Kevin. This guy was just Mr. Perfect for me. What’s after that? Mr. Right? The ONE? At this point, I don’t care. I think I’ve made my decision…I’m not getting married.
I guess in July if anything were to change my mind, it’s like I said, he would have to chase me down and stop me from running…then he’ll understand the term…”Running to Stand Still.”
