3/6/2011 - the fear of wanting to fall. . .

I woke up this morning thinking about relationships for some reason, the delicate nature of them.  I wish I could explain where these thoughts come from and why.  Or, actually, it'd be nice to just think of simpler things like American Idol or whatever else is cool nowadays.  But as I laid in bed, fighting the morning, simultaneously wanting to get up to start the day and putting it off indefinitely, I wrestled with the question of how it is that two people manage to not only find each other but stay together for any amount of time.  I don't know why I thought this, or what it means that I did, but the idea of it bounced back and forth in my head.

I thought of how a relationship feels like it is held in supreme balance on good days, leveled on the head of a pin.  On bad ones, though, it feels more like standing on a cliffside with your toes dangling over the edge.  Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being defined vertigo as not necessarily the fear of falling, but the fear of wanting to fall.  I think in a way, he could have been talking about love, both the pursuit and abdication of it.

I thought about Sam, a self-professed loner who claims that he is not one to pursue or care about being in a relationship of any kind, romantic or otherwise.  Where on the surface, this statement should put me in a rather dubious position, I know that he is just putting up a facade (or at least I hope).  I know that he once had a profile on Match.com, went on dates that ranged from fruitful to disastrous with people he enjoyed meeting and others he forgot about immediately afterwards.  Still, somewhere inside, he must have wanted to be with someone if he put forth the effort.  In spite of himself, he must have looked for love, and now, it is just too difficult to admit through the thick shell of armor he wears that he ever could have wanted something so human.

I'm not even sure why I am writing this, what it is I am thankful for today, or why it all came to me in the haze between waking and not.  It's just that I heard Sam and Grr playing downstairs, a sporadic squeak from Grr's raccoon chew toy, and as much as I wanted to join them, I could not will my body to move.  I was that tired.  Yet my mind was active and heard every time Sam laughed at Grr, told him to quiet down because I was sleeping, every time he said, "Good boy" as if it was the most exciting thing he had uttered in his life.  While fading in and out, I wondered how we, Sam and I, and to some extent, Grr as well, how we all got to where we are today.