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I was lost before I met you.

I was drifting without purpose.  I felt middle-aged after college, too old to repeat the “best four years of my life” and too small to handle what the world expected from me.  I was an emotional refugee, overwhelmed and over schooled.  I was empty.  

By contrast, all my peers seemed to know what they were doing.  My friends started their post-college lives with a bang, in the midst of an emotional and economic recession.  They were successful.  I know this because Facebook told me about their dream jobs and significant others.  So did Instagram and LinkedIn.

Everyone was in love, either with someone else or with their vocation.

The whole thing was unnerving, like the edges of wet jeans in the rain.  Everyone my age had purpose and direction—they were either in a relationship or had enough experiences to know what they wanted.  I didn’t.  I felt dumb, like my peers figured out something I hadn’t.  For me, the idea of love seemed out of reach as I drifted through a sea of crowded house parties.  I wondered why everyone my age was celebrating.  I wanted to know what I was missing.

I tried to seek out people that were as lonely as I was, to see how they coped.  Yet for as much as I saw, I learned even less.  Everything was PBR and American Spirits.  Everyone was looking rough, feeling raw, and in the prime of their lives.  If they were fated to pretend everything was fine, I couldn’t tell the difference.  The lonely ones were ignoring intimacy outright or throwing up their middle fingers because love was beneath them.  There was no middle ground.

I began to think that love was not something I was going to find, or at the very least, something I had missed out on completely.

I was dating a lot back then.  The people I met seemed nice, they were all 20 somethings like me, balancing societal expectations with a raw hunger that only comes out 4 beers in.  I remember losing sleep over restaurant reservations and my stupid hair.  I’d fake interest in other people’s startup speak and roommate wars.  It was a strange time.  I met a lot of nice people that maybe found me interesting, rather than being interested in me.

Maybe it was a two-way street on that front.

Everything was “Me, Me, Me” back then.  I was waiting for love to find ME--to fulfill ME.  I felt entitled to this connection, convinced of its purpose granting properties.  But finding commitment was elusive.  The people I met were mercurial, constantly shifting their values and their identity to whatever would make for a good Saturday night story.  I was too, only I didn’t see it at the time.  Maybe I should have.  Maybe all 20 somethings are like that, for a while anyways.

All I knew was that I was looking for a spark, a beacon in the big black nothing.

My hands couldn’t stop shaking when we first met.  I wasn’t used to sharing space with someone like you.  You laughed from deep inside.  Your wit was razor sharp.  You avoided that “cool” kind of apathy that keeps people guarded.  You listened, and you shared yourself with me.  I wasn’t used to this.  The possibility someone could be honest and genuine had never occurred to me.

I was dizzy.  You were present.  

I remember walking home with you after our first date.  You were bathed in orange from the streetlight and I remember feeling the electricity in the air, the fire in my veins.  Before I met you, that spark had a way of turning into a wildfire.  This was different.  That spark didn’t turn into a disaster, it provided us warmth.

It gave us light to work with in the big black nothing.

When we met, you were living in a flat that had too many roommates.  I remember the cracked fireplace and those cold bay windows that used to let in yellow light on Sunday mornings.  Nothing felt permanent in that flat, but it didn’t need to be.  Nobody knows how something will turn out just by looking at the blueprint.  You have an idea of how things will fit together at the start, and then you start building.

We started building in that flat.

I learned you were special when you showed me your values.  No one else had ever done that for me.  It was vulnerable and strong at the same time.  You have a way a bringing people closer to you, focusing on what others find joy in, sharing it with them.  People open up to you because there is no judgment in your voice.  Your intentions are honest.

The way you exercise empathy is astounding.  You nurture your friendships, you provide food to those without it, you jump in during times of crisis.  Everyone else I’ve dated painted empathy in swaths of one-size-fits-all gray, an accessory to raise their social status.  Not you. You use the whole spectrum of color, for everyone you meet.  You’re Dorothy, opening up the door to Oz.  Your empathy is action, a practice.

Your love is special that way.

Your love runs deep.  It’s inclusive.  Whether it was in that first flat or in a smoked-filled piano lounge when I finally put a name to it, your love was always with me.  I never had to ask for it.  Your love is strong, the walls that hold up our shelter.  It’s decorated with our memories and our time together.

Because it takes time to build something special.

You piece it together, one brick at a time.

But you can’t plan for everything and obstacles pop up.  Because sometimes, I really screw up.  I don’t always understand your choices, your perspective.  I’m not always conscientious, even when you explain that something is important.  Sometimes, I offer my opinion even though it is not always my place to offer that opinion.  Sometimes, my actions cost us time together like when I lost months with you preparing for the Bar Exam, twice.  This is all a roundabout way of saying I haven’t made it easy for us and I know that.

I was worried that you would fall out of love with me because I would eventually stop meeting your expectations.  Because I’m not always a good person.  

And yet, you never waivered.

You never second guessed me when I was less than my best self for you.  Sometimes I am not careful with my words when you need me to be.  Sometimes, I’m not my most thoughtful.  But you are patient with me even if you struggle with patience.  I appreciate that patience and I’m sometimes undeserving of it.  I’m sometimes slow to see the bigger picture and I know that must be frustrating at times.  But you are patient with me to come back around.

You were patient enough to know I needed time to reciprocate your love.

You’re a good teacher when it comes to patience and I’m trying to become a better student.

I’m amazed when people say love should be easy, that it shouldn’t be “work.”  That’s a ridiculous line of thought.  Anything worth having, worth creating, takes effort.  O. Henry makes the Magi exchange gifts and give of themselves.  Paul and Linda McCartney recorded RAM together, not because they had to, but because they wanted to.  Clementine and Joel can’t scare each other away at the end of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; they both know it’s hell out there and the only hope they have is in each other.

I think love operates the same way, though it’s taken me a while to figure that out.  Cultivating love with someone always creates more questions than answers but that’s really the point. You get to figure out those answers together.

I believe that love is empowering if you drop the notion that it’s all about “Me, Me, Me.”  You don’t wait for it to come to you.  No one can build love alone and no one can expect it to simply appear from the big black nothing.  You have to create it.  You have to be strong and vulnerable, at the same time.  You have to be patient, and that patience has to be genuine.  It is a bond between people, hoping to make sense of the senseless.

More than anything, love is a place where you belong with and for someone else.

Love is home.

With you.