funhouse

I didn’t know I was expecting him but when he arrived I knew him all along, and invited him in without hesitation. This was the visitor I’d wished for all my life. This was love. And then, eventually, it wasn’t love at all – it was simply a distorted reflection of all my own broken bits, and I couldn’t stand looking, and so I left.

After all this, and several times all this, I’d still like to fall in love again before I die. Because when it comes!!!! Oh, when it comes? It arrives in a rush of pale pink lava-sparks, your brain-bones are replaced with wavy poet-bones, you hear cellos again, you love so much you even love thy god-awful neighbor. You leap out of bed in the morning as if propelled by pink fizz, and run into heroic pink arms.

Falling in love is such a high that some relationship spent their entire lives chasing that first perfect burst of pink flavor. That time when you laughed so hard you cried, that time at the cabin, that time driving to the mountains. That time you accidentally fell into hot lava and fused yourself to a tilt-a-whirl.

That time, and that other time, and the next time. But what a disappointment to sit in THIS time; watching him chew across the table, jaw making that wretched clicking sound, just the smacking sounds of disappointment and his skin tags to keep you company.

I believe in love, but I’m wary of too much pink; I’m made dizzy by its fun-house lies. It seems to me that falling in love always falls away. It disintegrates like cotton candy in the rain, and if you aren’t careful, when it pulls away it leaves behind a freak show. And you are the freaking star.

Is there anything more painful than to stare into your own reflection and see an endless stretch of disappointment; a squat and shrunken heart; a round bloat of expectation; a huge headed rage? After all the pink, you stand before a funhouse mirror and don’t recognize yourself. You don’t recognize him. He doesn’t recognize you. What the hell happened to the carnival lights? To the bubbleyummy flip? To that tilt-a-whirl of love?

I’m not sure, but I think if it visits me again I’ll be brave enough to let go of the safety bar and step off the ride. I’ll be strong enough to make eye contact with his skin tags. I’ll be wise enough to know what I’m really wishing for. Maybe next time I fall in love, when all the lights have pulled away and the night gets quiet, I’ll be left standing in an empty field under a sky of god, hand in hand with flesh and bone, where love can come to stay.