Is This Love?

Emotions are a tricky thing. They’re kind of like ninjas the way they have the ability to sneak up on you when you least expect it. They’re quick and if you’re not careful you can definitely get hurt in some way. My whole life has been training in the delicate art of emotional kung fu. I know how to fight off any emotion in a hand-to-hand combat, but a true emotional kung fu master knows to always keep your eyes and ears open at all times. If you let your guard down once you make yourself vulnerable for a surprise attack.

            Something interesting happened to me the other night. It began simple enough, I was settling nicely into bed with my blanket and Netflix on my computer when I found myself staring off into space. In the darkness of my room I felt something. It was a feeling deeper than what I felt for family and friends. It was stronger than gravity the way it held me down in such a powerful way, but lighter than air as I felt like I could reach the stars. It was a warm feeling, like, taking a bubble bath with the water at that perfect temperature. It enveloped my heart in a state of euphoria and I was helpless to resist its power. I lost all sense of time, night and day became one and memories flew past me like speeding cars. As I fell further and further into this feeling a face appeared to me. It’s as if this face drew me to it calling out to me in some cosmic way so that I would find it somewhere in the back of my mind.

            Out of all the people in this whole wide world and it had to be his. It had to be his face, his smile, his whole being. I was suddenly sixteen again and I began to remember the way he made me feel when we would drive around in his car, me sitting quietly in the passenger seat hoping he couldn’t tell how nervous I was while he blasted his music from his stereo. I remembered our first date, which, was slightly awkward from the panic attack I was having in my head because we snuck into the movie we picked to watch (I still to this day can’t sneak into a movie because of the inevitable guilt trip that will follow from feeling like I cheated the theater in some way) and having my cousin and one of his friends tag along with us. It was all coming back to me now: going to the soccer fields where we wrestled in his car because he took my beanie and played keep away with it, reclining his seats back and listening to him talk about something that happened in his day, sneaking out of my house late at night just to meet him outside, the moonlit kisses and falling asleep with the afterglow from the night before.

            I basked in these moments in time blissfully unaware of my life in the present, but with the blink of an eye the memories started to reverse and the glow along with his face started to fade away from my sight. I was back in the present again, back to my life five years later. I wasn’t sixteen anymore and this wasn’t Portales. I was in my own home surrounded by the life I had created with my own two hands, and now these hands wanted nothing more than to be laced with the same hands that stirred the butterflies in my stomach. It felt like these butterflies had made their way to my heart and formed a protective barrier around it and saying: “Don’t be afraid. We’re not here to hurt you. Just embrace this feeling and you’ll know what to do.” Suddenly the glow from the past returned to my body except it amplified itself by ten, maybe, twenty times and I lied there letting it pulse throughout my body gently grazing every nerve ending with its shimmering light. And with that shimmer I saw the truth; I think I might be falling for this man . . . .

            It was true, I cared for him more than a friend and more than a lover. I was feeling genuine emotions for him. You know the kind all those love sick people would talk about but we were all too busy rolling our eyes to pay attention? Yeah, those type of emotions. But had our window closed? Isn’t there that time frame where you two have to seal the deal or stay in the “friend’s zone”? Maybe we had a chance somewhere in our mixed up history, but I didn’t even know if the thought ever even crossed HIS mind at all. Ever. He was a man who knew what he wanted and went out and chased it down till he got it, and I was never in his tunnel vision.

            I’m not a believer in random events or moments. These feelings fell from the sky and came to me for a reason and I wasn’t fighting it or trying to find the switch to turn them off for once. So if I could describe this feeling I am experiencing; if I could sum it up in just one word I’d pick: Lovely. I don’t recall anyone else being able to make such an impact on me like he did, and now I wasn’t afraid to feel it. But I couldn’t help but wonder: Was I really feeling lovely or was I feeling love?

Xoxo.

B.