Check, mate?

You can think of whom you love and whom you could build a life with and they can be vastly different people.

This is a simple statement, a given, perhaps, in the reality of life, but I pause after tying shoelaces and resign myself to a scorching jog in later morning sun as I unlock the front door to let myself back in the house to this computer to write that statement down.

All flavors in the ice cream sundae will make you sick. All colors on the palette will make the canvas brown. Will the idea of all loves in the same time, space, and person always make you wonder, "what if...?" when you adapt yourself otherwise?

I know nothing about this, about considered choice that entails an exemption of alternatives. To the same extent, then I know nothing about considered choice that leads to having an integral, consistent, focal point of reference that shapes your life. Consider the number of words I have to talk about something I know nothing about. This is also a reality of life.

I am talking about commitment, if that wasn't clear, but talking about commitment first requires a commitment to talking about commitment, and I'm not just trying to be clever, I'm trying to continue to be as elusive as possible to make the concept slippery.

I am talking about making a commitment to someone, in time and space, in a way that exempts someone else (imaginative, figurative, past, present, future), in another time and space. Or that you can see yourself with someone in a time and space but not a tense -- not past or present or future, but just there. Is that the love you choose? Is that the safe choice? Is that the rewarding choice? Is that destiny? Wait, but then is that choice? Is love about choice? Well stupid, I don't think so!

So you clutch your heart for a minute and assess its weight and dimensions. Old World Loves and New World Wants, I used to proclaim, as the width and depth on my heart measuring tape. Today it seems, since we're talking about love and want and they seem to be confoundingly the same (removing the historical and cultural onus of "obligation" from the idea of love), the tape markers have changed: Old World Dreams and New World Hopes. Old World Stories? Old World Belonging? Oh fuck, well it seems I still can't bring myself to say what is more important, the ever-present past or the ever-longing future. Which is all to say, to any still confused about my latest abstraction, is that I find myself again dating a much older man and discover a loving and exciting and grounding relationship in this man, but am feeling a puppy gnaw at my heels begging me to look the other way. Or rather, telling me that I will, as only a matter of time. With any new relationship with intense feelings you find yourself putting on your future goggles, taking the relationship to its logical conclusions as far as you can see them. And the simple fact when dating someone so much older than you is that he has a much more established schedule of life he would like for you to partake in and you wonder when it will arrive that you resent him for robbing you of the chance to figure it out on your own.

On the flipside, I realize that I face the same complex of choice the other way around -- if dating my own age cohort, there is rather an old sage with a staff who bonks me on the shoulder and punches me in the lower belly, hijacking my passion for older men. Shit. Doomed.

And then maybe this all is not about age, or Old World, or New World, or past, present, or future. Maybe it is again about love. And I think of the faces and spirits of particular individuals I have been lucky to know and to love and in whom my anxieties aren't just distracted but not longer exist. I have loved these boys so much that I couldn't handle it or express myself. I have loved stupidly. I have felt ridiculous and unworthy, awed by the depth of my own feeling and humiliated by it. It is fantasy, this? Remnants of Christian revivalism? It is growing pains? Am I nostalgic for feelings that are not sustainable or adaptable? Or did I actually know love when it sat beside me (rather than when it slapped me in the face), and do i miss that, love's innocence?

I am about done thinking about this. I am just going to finish up by rambling. I am only 26 years old. I want companionship but I also want adventure. I would really prefer not to be alone anymore. Across from where I am sitting right now there is a sand painting of a 3-dimensional cross laden with wreath and shawl. Inscribed with white sand is the quote:

I asked Jesus,
"How much do
You love me?"
"This much,"
He answered.
Then he stretched
out his arms
and died.

I think that is a very depressing thing (in kind of competitive language) to put up as decoration in a home, or even in a house of God. A love that leaves you behind. That hurts! I mean, he came back, supposedly. And why must "I" (I believe this means God?!? or is this me?!?) insist on calculating love's size? How can love be equated with death, that to love is to die? So you don't die you don't love? Is this reference why I used to have a panic attack every time I realized I loved someone?