I've been trying to come up with a suitable follow-up for the previous entry, and struggling. Not because our little fable ended badly....but because it didn't. Our chosen god came through, stepped up, if not altogether lively, and the disciples rejoiced. The favored disciple, however, is still rubbing her eyes to make sure they're not deceiving her. Believing, it turns out, is much harder than not.

I know there are people out there in the world for whom Love is easy. They meet someone special, fall willingly and unresistingly into Love's embrace, contentedly commit, and live more or less happily ever after. I am not one of those people. Neither, it seems, are any of my closest friends. Nor is my Beloved. Instead, we are terrified and recalcitrant. We push and pout and run and rage and do just about everything possible to drive Love away. We regard Love with dis-ease and distrust, constantly questioning it. Why are you here? Why are you staying? What the hell is wrong with you? What makes YOU different than all the others? Inside, we cling in a desperate panic, but outside, we hold Love at arm's length, determined not to show the vulnerability we regard as a despicable weakness. We are ridiculous with our contortions to avoid the very thing we most want.

And so we stand vigilant in the comfort of our qualms. In cynicism we trust. Dysfunction and despair, we know cold, so it's easy to talk about, easy to write about, easy to live there. I could write a hundred songs and talk endlessly about Love Gone Wrong, but when it's Right, I feel like a fool saying so. Rarely at a loss for words of doubt and dismissal, I find myself stumbling uncertainly in the lexicon of Love. Hard enough to express something so unfamiliar, but worse yet, what if I turn out to be wrong about the whole damn thing?

So I envy those who find all this easy, those for whom Trust and Faith is a given, not a warily-granted exception. It is a poor commentary on my life thus far that I actually have to get used to being treated as I should have been all along, but there it is. And I'm getting there, slowly, and rather stubbornly. Perhaps someday, in good time, I'll not only admit readily to being in Love, I won't defiantly don the disguise of someone who's trying desperately to get out of it.