I am asking this to you: my current, future, past soulmate wherever whomever you are. Would you teach me love? I think I’ve found it with you or at least the idea of how I want you to appear, behave, or treat me. I should stop myself there at the word “think”, because thinking is what took up the valuable seconds in my head when I should have spoken or been present with you in the moment, but silence was the downfall with my lovers in the past; Dead love cannot be resurrected to answer my question. How can I really know for a certain you are what love looks like just because my heart tells me you are a major source of happiness? My heart is beating, so I must be happy and I must be in love. I have trust issues with my heart. I think I have felt love, but I am not sure what it looks or sounds like. I have been told to have faith: a blind trust that if I believe without seeing the future, things will work out the way they are meant to. That definition doesn’t sit well with me, because it’s describing patience without my inherit anxiety of not knowing what’s to come. I need concrete evidence, because I have wasted years chasing love’s imposter, but nothing is ever concrete. Love is not built on concrete. It’s built on sand, waves, jungles, and swinging hammocks. A tropical vacation getaway scene does not answer my question or bring me any closer to knowing love, but it is simply where I sit currently waiting for my love to wash ashore as I wade through occasional empty bottles with no messages in them.

Coming from someone who has found love in many places, I cannot help but be confused of what love’s true face looks like. Handing out the word like free fliers announcing that I am open for business is more or less what I can amount my experience to. I’m writing this in an effort to narrow down what love means to me. I may get lost along the way, but sometimes getting lost is how you find what you’re looking for.

I know when I lay on your lap and you play with my hair, all patience, anxiety, and the unknown go out the window. You have a way with shutting the ugliness out from our warm room with your ability to latch the window shut tightly. When you leave me, who will shut the window? Who will teach me love if I do not know it already for a certainty? These questions have gone unanswered for a while and I have had to live with the uncomfortable feeling when I am alone. 

Being alone is not what I am afraid of. Being alone knowing that out there in the vast world of couples, there are people experiencing a sort of joy, fun, and fulfillment that I fall short of while entertaining myself with reading the paper and asking Susie the cat what she thinks of the current state of our economy. Chewie the dog seems to not care what I talk about as long as I pet him and I guess I should care a lot that I have become so lonely I talk to my animals for companionship. Do you see what leaving me in my lonesome can do?

So when I reach for my phone and dial your number, please know that I am doing only so out of an idea of love that I have. I hope you are not scared by my wanting to speak to you. When I hear your voice from the other end of the world, my mind revs up into overdrive in an attempt to recreate your entire body structure into a 3D model I can almost envision sitting in the chair across from me as I talk to you. I know envisioning your soft nude body walking closer to me is only me craving your touch and intimacy, but I think I  know the difference between fun and innocent pleasure compared to the core definition of love. At least I know love is not lust for pleasure rather love is letting the image of you go if you choose to move on to another helpless romantic like me. Love is how you treat me: You hold old photos of us delicately in your hands treasuring each memory you have spent with me. You do not regret any time spent with me and I suppose if you did then it was not actually love, for even though you might have been physically beside me, you were not mine and I was not yours and it was not love; You were already away. I hope to find another version of you that I won’t lose so carelessly.

I know I said there would be no talk about self-love, but I can’t help but see times in my life where I was neglecting my body and mind forcing you to distance yourself from me. Does that mean that self-love is a prerequisite for love between a romantic partner? I see myself older and wiser practicing more self-love and I am skeptic in what the future you will do. Will you see my self-love as too selfish? When I did not love myself you saw me as weak; I appeared less capable of caring for your feelings and well-being and that made you run. 

I guess the answer to this question is no; You will not teach me to love when I am not loving myself. How can I put that expectation on someone else to love me when I am not doing it first? Loving someone including yourself IS a lot of work and until you figure out the self love, you cannot have a long term love, because something will fall apart (including yourself). Do not teach me to love. If I have not figured it out before you, I will suck the love that you have stored away in your heart that is dedicated for your own self-love. Do not waste away teaching me and feeding me what love looks or sounds like. I will have to figure this out before I expect you to teach me anything else about loving you.

When I scan your body, the words coming from your mouth, and the various ways your eyelids flex, I am wanting to understand you more. I am wanting to discover how the wrinkles in your hands and the space between your cheeks and hairline create the beautiful person I look at. I stare at things I like: an ice-cream cone, a hybrid hibiscus flower blooming, or an open honey jar not yet spooned into. The power of my stare when I look at you is triple fold compared to my amusement of food and flowers. How do you feel when you catch me looking at you? I have already complimented you once on our first date, so you know I like what you’re wearing and how you body fits into the clothes, so how does an after dinner stare equate to a deeper level of liking turned into love? 

When we are sad to the fullest extent, our eyes pour out salty water drops. When we are nervous, our stomach and abdominal muscles tense and wring in uncomfortableness, but what happens when we love? I know my heart pounding a hundred beats per minute is probably due to you caressing me before our naked wrestling ritual where we slide our bodies across and between each other waiting to attract pleasure from the other’s mouth through sound. 

None of this is love though, because when we sit at the airport with my bags packed, our good bye is sad. If love is so important to be talking about (or writing about) then why all the long faces of sadness? I have stared at you for hours and you have watched me sleep morning after morning; How does that eye contact not add up to a storage tank where love is kept for future use. Love cannot be captured in our eyes for if it could I’d keep the image of you together with the feelings felt to hopefully have some material to recreate that feeling of love when I am not around you. I cannot look at you and expect love to naturally fall in place and stay. 

It’s been a couple of months or a lifetime; Time doesn’t seem to matter when I’m looking at you for what may seem like the best afternoon of my life, but it still matters, because sooner or later you are gone. When you are gone, my dreams count the number of nights before I may actually see a more physical truer version of you in the flesh. For now I will settle for memories of you: They prance over my eyelids showing me all the times we spent together and apart and all the phone calls we made. My heart misses what it cannot see anymore, so when my eyes are away from you is when you may teach me love.

Through past careers, relationships, college, spiritual journeying, and several self-help books I have discovered that there are lots of my-selves that I have found to claim, but none of them seemed to fit. I tried on some leather boots while owning a horse to call myself “country”. I went to wineries on the weekend  to call myself a Californian. I moved near the beach to call myself a surfer. I bought a singing bowl to call myself a Buddhist. Each time I think I have finally figured myself out, I reach out, so you may finally teach me love, but when you stare back at me, you can almost sense I am not me yet; You are looking only at a partially constructed soul behind my eyes and if you are wise then you will know you cannot fix me. You cannot save me. You cannot tame me. You can teach me, but you are not ready to teach someone who is not themself yet. You are yourself (I assume) and you wish to find someone else who recognizes themselves and you as two authentic human beings with no surprises up their sleeves. I have long sleeves even in the Summer time when I am dreaming of a love ripe with sunshine and iced mint lemonade. I like mint, onions, garlic, ginger, and turmeric, but maybe that’s only because I’m with you right now. Am I simply gaining new tastes and likes because I am improving and bettering myself or is it simply an adaptation technique I have learned over the years how to seem more like myself? When I am with someone else my life becomes more or less theirs.  When does it become mine? When I grab it with my teeth and run fast far away from the herd where no one can hear me or hinder my inhibitions to be myself. The problem with hunting alone in the wild is you have no one with you to share your meal with, but maybe that’s who I am now: A lone hunter in search of love. A love hunter.