Funny How Love Is

I was going to write this about Valentine's Day and why I think it's a fucking joke, but I've done that. I started writing about the day after I found out my ex was cheating on me. Nobody wants to hear about that. Then I started writing about the day after he almost killed me. Nobody wants to hear about that, either. Not only that, I don't want to think about it. I relived that night too many times over the years. I'm not that girl any more.

Love changed me. Meeting Lemur changed me. I didn't love myself then, so finding someone with patience for the girl who didn't know how to play video games and who'd been "too cool" to watch anything but Star Wars and Indiana Jones was special. Lemur wanted to be a teacher when we first met. He would have been a good teacher, too. He taught me how to be human again after I'd spent life up to that point thinking I had to be perfect.

Love is perfection, but perfection isn't the only path to being loved. Love is perfect because it is imperfect. Finding someone who can love you even when you fail, even when you hurt them as much as you hurt yourself, helps heal the broken parts in this fractured world. Am I still broken? Yes. I'll always be a little broken. I take out the pieces sometimes and look at them when I want to make my characters suffer. The difference is I don't throw those pieces at people as a way to protect myself as often as I once did. I certainly don't throw them at Lemur. He licks them. It's gross.

"Funny how love is everywhere, just look and see." It took meeting Lemur for me to see the love in everything, even in the child who dated that psychopath and wanted to be perfect for him. All paths lead to my success, even that mess. I can write some serious shit from my own experience. So far, I've chosen not to, but the day is coming when I'll be ready to share my darkness as well as my light. Funny how love is the darkness, too.