Living La Vida… Boo-Less

I will attempt to provide a brief synopsis of the past couple of years of my “love” life, a chronicle of events that lead to me living la vida boo-less. I will probably not do a good job as I am condensing years of feelings, experiences and thoughts into an half hour summary, but here goes nothing….About four years ago I was convinced that I no longer wanted to be single. I was 20 and ready for love! With India Aire’s song, “Ready For Love” as my inspiration at the time, it was in heavy rotation on my CD player and it’s lyrics would almost indefinitely leave me in tears every time:

I am ready for love

Why are you hiding from me?

I’d quickly give all my freedom

To be held in your captivity

Indeed this song was written with me in mind, if not every song lyric, every strum of the guitar seemed to convey accurately, like nothing else could, the melody of my heart. I was young and while every one around me seemed to be enjoying a “boo-ed up” life, I was determined to leave many a lonely night behind me. Of course, I payed less attention to other of this same song’s lyrics such as the part that said:

Lately I’ve been thinking that

You’re (love that is) not ready for me

Maybe you think I need to learn maturity

They say watch what you ask for

‘Cause you may receive…

It’s only in retrospect that I can say that indeed I didn’t know the first thing about love and even the love I so desperately sought and professed to be ready for was rooted in selfishness. Love would have been right to hide from me a little while longer because I was not ready for it. Didn’t know how to recognize it, how to sacrifice for it, how it should be displayed and acceptably reciprocated. Desperation for a relationship, any relationship left me jumping at the first guy who made me laugh until it hurt, complimented me and whose company I enjoyed without even considering for a moment if we were compatible in any way. My mission was accomplished though, I was not boo-less any more. I had what I asked for…. a boo. By the time I realized the things that I had been blind to but were existent all along:

1. We had nothing in common and hence weren’t compatible
2. We weren’t on the same level intellectually
3. Our everyday normal conversations were non-existent because they were replaced with arguments over words taken out of context
4. I finally had a boo yet was still miserable

I was two years into the relationship, time had flew by more quickly than I intended it to and I was left wishing I had know sooner that:

1. I should have been just a tad more discriminatory with a man I decided to call boo
2. Jealousy will never mean true love
3. Just because a guy is great doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a great guy for you

I had a run in with a love from my teenage years when things really started to get almost unbearably rocky with my going-on-three-years-boo. He reminded me that there did exist a man who could be everything I wanted in a boo… or so it seemed.  He appeared to be everything my current boo was not and then some. He was my ticket to the love I had been ready for. I called it splits-ville with said boo and despite my desire to be single, I jumped at what I thought would be my chance at true love finally. Of course while I was operating under the notion that if you let a man go and he comes back to you he’s yours, he was operating by others, namely if you’ve never slept with a woman while you two were together, it’s a good idea to at least attempt to. Needless to say, it didn’t last very long….that was not the love I had sang about, cried about longed for or imagined.

Now I’m living la vida boo-less and I couldn’t be happier for the time to myself to grow, to mature and be extra careful with what I ask for in 2009!

Broken Hearted Deaths

I was in a meeting at work last week and someone made reference to a famous actor [whose name I would have been able to insert here had I been paying attention] dying as a result of what this woman believed to be a broken heart. Obviously the meeting had taken an unexpected turn and veered off to some unrelated tangent for her to have said that. After all I work with middle school students at present. However, after the statement was made, I completely tuned out all subsequent discussion because I knew a new blog entry had been born, namely: Can people really die of a broken heart? I have heard of people suspecting it to be the case, especially when the elderly die. Be it as a result of a loss of a child, parent or a spouse, despite what the medical research and autopsy’s offer as possible causes of death, countless people are convinced of death due to broken hearts. I have never heard of this being the case with young people though, for obvious reasons I suppose, with all the vitality and resilience young people possess, it’d be hard to imagine that one could experience so much pain in 20 years of existence that would result in a death due to broken-hearted-ness. Or could it? I understand that that same pain expounded upon after 40 and 60 years, eventually takes a toll on one heart and I could see it leading to physical death. And while there are articles out there to support this, you will never find one that references the many people who have died from a broken heart and are still alive. And that’s because they have died in a different sense of the word.

Hoping not to get off to too much of a tangent myself, I think what was said in The Secret Life of Bees, can add some clarity to the above statement. I’ll spare you the movie review but will suffice it to say that it was awesome, and there was one line in particular from the movie that really stood out to me; and it was that in life people can start out one way but after life gets through with them they come out completely different. If I could rephrase that for the purposes of this entry it would be that people [for all intents and purposes] do start out one way in life: perhaps vibrant, loving, pure, trusting, honest. Let’s just say for arguments sake their approach toward love is sincere, open hearted and genuine but after having ones heart broken, their is some type of death, and there is some type of loss of these previously existent attributes. We know this. How many people have we known who were one way before “love got through with them” and then they have been stripped of everything that made them who they were, they are unrecognizable even. Maybe not in a physical sense but in personality and character. And while this may sound extreme, in our own lives I am sure there have been accounts of even us dying as a result of a broken heart. Dying to the notion of true love maybe, deaths of trust and sincerity.

Whatever the case, If we could record it, there are more deaths from broken hearts than we know. People die everyday, yet they live on. People who are dead emotionally, walking around entering new relationships with other dead people, or even worse, those who have yet to experience death from a broken heart. Walking wounded, most completely unaware of when they even died to begin with. Heart transplant anyone?

Poetry In Motion

A man in love is a beautiful sight

Because you watch as these sometimes macho

Sometimes huge

Sometimes strong specimens,

Become undone and fall apart at their [seemingly macho] seams

Making themselves vulnerable to the notion of true love
A man in this state is both precious and delicate;
Precious because often time he is extremely selective with whom he will share his heart with
Delicate in the sense that one wrong incision in the heart of this man can adversely affect him for years to come
With feelings ranging from fear to overwhelming exhilaration
For the woman who has the honor of having a man’s heart in her possession, it would do her well to be considerate of the fragile state a man’s heart is in who is in love;

How delicately the woman who has captured his heart must tread
However thoughts of this are coupled with tears

As I am reminded of the men’s hearts I thought I had in my possession that I had to relinquish rights to
Because although I tried to be as delicate as I could be, the favor was not returned

They failed to see how both delicate and beautiful the heart of a woman in love can be as well

*This post is being submitted from another blog site of mine

**Entitled Poetry in Motion because it was written while I was on the train…while in motion