The many different types of love
I have loved my best friend for a long time — the whole time, in fact, and I will never do anything about it. There is a strange beauty in restraint, in pausing and waiting to see what will unfold after all the others have thundered out of the starting gate, the dust has billowed and settled and then blown away.
Still I stand here. I waited and did nothing, though many nights I berated myself harshly for my own inaction. Then, graceful out of the moonlight, she came effortlessly, and she did not lie awake and agonise because it was easy, right. The woman who was meant to love him, and who he loved back with a ready and glad heart. I watched them wistfully and knew that it was right, and just. It was meant. I stood alone but didn’t for a second begrudge him what he had because I wanted so much for him to be happy, really, truly happy and now he was.
This is one type of love.
Being a single parent is hard sometimes. It’s always harder than being in a two-parent family, but sometimes the reality of it hits me like a wave and there is nowhere to hide from just how lonely it is. Times like this, when I type quietly so as not to wake my child, who is ill. I am feverish too, and there is no-one to ask to help. There is no-one here but me. If I get desperate I can call his Dad, who lives in a different town and I know I am lucky that I can do so. But he will not be here to take the night watch, to lie awake a long time listening for the sound of delirious crying or the coughing that might lead to vomiting, heart fluttering all the while with the same dizzy illness.
That is another type of love.
In my dreams I meet my future partner, and he reaches for my hand, or places a cool palm to my face, or my shoulder. I know that he is mine and he is moving towards me.
Sometimes in waking life I see his glance in someone else's eyes and my heart stops for a moment. I know then that there are many people I could love, and each of them in a different way.
I know also that there is one who is plodding carefully and deliberately towards me. Maybe he will be mine for a lifetime, or maybe just for a while. I do not know. Perhaps I don’t want to know.
Wait, my dreams say. Do not try to find him, he will come to you. Be still.
I wait with a certainty I don’t understand. I dream of him and I know deep in my heart that we will meet. I do not want anyone else.
Still I stand here.
When it is right, I will know.
That is the saddest and the sweetest love of all.
