Falling in Love
“Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center. Big, undreamed-of things—the people on the edge see them first.”
Kurt Vonnegut
I kept wishing I could fall in love. It’s one thing to fall in love with a person who isn’t available or who lives halfway across the world, and it’s another thing to fall in love with someone who is there. I know the ache of longing better than I know almost any other feeling aside from, perhaps, hunger. But the ache of having? Not so much.
Yesterday I was lying in bed, counting the leaves left on the tree outside my window, and it occurred to me that I was so lucky. Lying in bed is something I do a lot. Some people might label this thing called lying in bed and counting leaves a luxury. I’m not working a factory job that doesn’t pay my bills. I’m not out searching for water for my children. I’m day dreaming, looking at the way the light makes dried-up leaves look like music.
And then something amazing happened. A breeze stirred and a leaf lost its grip on its branch, and as I watched the leaf do that lovely dance of falling from the tree, I realized the erroneous nature of my thinking. Falling in love is not a pick-up game or a commercial break. It’s the whole dog and pony show. We are born—we fall out of our mothers, and until we hit the dirt of our grave, we fall through our lives, we fall in love, and then we die.
We fall in love the way a fish swims in water. We fall in love the way the leaf fell from the tree. Love is all there is. We sleep in love. We walk in love. We play rugby in love. We eat popovers in love. And there I was, arms outstretched like Frankenstein, looking for it.
When I think I am not in love, I feel smaller, sadder, less myself, but I’ve got my thinking all wrong! I’m not sad because I’m not in love. I’m sad because I’m in love and I am too blind to see it.
There are those moments you throw yourself off the edge of a cliff with wild faith something will catch your fall because more than anything you want to experience what is on the other side, and you get there, and you live your life, and it was even more wonderful than you ever could have imagined.
Something has been shifting inside of me. I feel like I may be done writing about adoption. I want to write about love. I think I have been missing the point.
Of it all.
The whole thing.
Life.
