This morning is amazing, and so are you.
[No. 37]
WHY ARE HUMANS SO SCARED TO LOVE?
“This much I know to be true
This morning is amazing and so are you”
Nick Cave
As we extracted ourselves from wild DTLA, Nico told me that he bought the tickets the week we broke up. He said that somehow he knew we would go to the show together [having no idea what that would look like]. He was right; there are things we just know.
Driving along the 101, I told Nico I was speechless. “Well then, hopefully Nick will come back through town again soon,” he teased me. I like to process things out loud. Nico is more internal. As friends, we meet somewhere in between. Life is a dance.
Or a song.
When we said goodbye as lovers, I was both clear and crestfallen. We took space, and eventually almost a year later I found myself writing to him from Bhutan. [We each became our own balloons, and we quietly, in some way, held each other’s strings.] Independent dreams had come to fruition in our months apart. We were rooting for each other, knowing every silent cheer by heart.
I asked about him in a meeting with a Buddhist monk. I asked about circles, cycles. Do people and things come back? Are they allowed to? When are we to lay bricks, and when are we to break down barriers? The monk said that [as long as it feels safe, right, etc.] when someone comes back enough times, we usually ought to let them. He spoke of past lives and karmic threads [YES!]. Time is not a straight line, but a choppy sea.
So, to answer your question, Alien, why are we scared to love? It puts us in the spotlight. Maybe to be in conversation with love is to brazenly self-accept. To trust oneself with gusto. Love challenges the ways we keep ourselves falsely safe. The bombs and borders do not protect us. Love asks us to walk in the great unknown with confidence and to seek each other’s common threads, even when we are different. Love does not ask to be categorized. When we are present with love, we crack open and sprout into something fresh. To love and keep loving is so brave.
Your question was with me as I sat shoulder to shoulder with Nico at the concert. Song after song, teary-eyed, I contemplated the payoff when we take a leap of trust. I remembered the first time he sent me a Nick Cave song. I was sitting at my kitchen table, and he was cruising through Utah in the rain. He always felt close through music. I rode through lucid memories of our time, then flashed to this week when we drank Lambrusco and spoke of our sparkling new love interests. I had been broken open, and I let the sunshine in. As the band played, I belonged to both everyone and no one except myself. It was as though absolutely anything was possible. I welcomed [I welcome] the world into my arms.
Feeling utterly laid bare is okay. It cuts us down the middle, snatches us from slumber, and invites us to hop on a magic carpet ride. Intimacy! Nico has said over the years that he is equally enamored with the pain and joy of love. I decided that night in the crowd, in that ancient golden theater, looking at shapes on the painted ceiling, this: the thing about love is that regardless of the spectacle, simply holding a ticket in your hand is to feel alive.