Love is not enough

Love is not enough to prevent the metaphorical Devil and his demons from cunningly and imperceptibly creeping into your relationship, destroying it bit by bit, like the sugar that rots away a tooth over time.

Keep your guard up! Don’t delude yourself into thinking that flirtation or fantasy play behind a screen is harmless. He is a predator, searching for the microscopic cracks in your loving behavior, slithering his way into them, feasting on their weak walls like a hungry termite, and making space for the others to enter and contribute to his project, which is to destroy your relationship from the inside out.

Breakfast with Sylvia

The outdoor billboard declares: “NO MASKS OR VIRUS HERE!”

Finally, a place that serves a decent breakfast, minus the humiliation of temperature checks and forced sanitizing. No scraps of virus riding piggyback on strips of bacon; no waitresses sneezing Covid laced pollen my way. A pre-pandemic breakfast, the way it used to be. Great money making concept, I think to myself. Breakfasts of yesteryear!

The meal is perfect! A fluffy wrap of sunshiny yellow egg stuffed with spinach, onion, mushroom,and cheddar, with strips of crispy bacon, and a side of hot cakes drizzled with a sweet maple syrup that is to die for. I’m in breakfast heaven!

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Butterflies and red flags

“When all you know is fight or flight, red flags and butterflies all feel the same.”
~ Cindy Cherie

The more you desire someone, the more you fear being ruined or destroyed by your vulnerabilities to them. Your early butterflies, slowly but insidiously, transforming into red flags. In the heat of your desire and need, your fear becomes exaggerated; and you make the decision to either fight the invisible enemies within, take flight from them, or do both. The irony being that either way, the fight or flight pushes away what you wanted or thought you needed, your fear being the real enemy.

Alternative version: Free verse

The object of desire is your greatest vulnerability; the path to your elusive joy or inevitable ruin: recycled and reimagined.

Early butterflies—slowly but insidiously—transform into the red flags of paranoia. The fear of loss and humiliation enclosing you like a vice grip.

In the heat of desire and neediness, you fight or take flight from the invisible enemies within: the delusions of demons who would steal your joy or facilitate your shame. And this will assuredly keep you separated from your object of desire; your fear and paranoia being the most crafty of enemies.

No surrender

It was your neediness against her lovelessness. You reached and she held back, sometimes dangling, but never bestowing, not to where you felt bereft of loving kindness.

So many iterations of reaching versus dangling, but never the bestowing, never her surrender. Love was her commodity, her convenience, to be withheld for fun or bartered on the run.

The spiral of pain

Often, we obsessively seek love from the people who find it the most difficult to love us. Their holding back, mirrors where we feel the least loved and most needy, committing us to the long, painful, downward spiral of pursuit, seemingly without end, until at last, at the lowest point of our despondency, the spiral itself reaches its end, mercifully kicking us to the curb.

Love: Jungian style

“People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
~ Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I’m reminded of the Jungian concept of men having a feminine aspect, referred to as the anima; and women having a masculine aspect, referred to as the animus. The theory being that “all” human beings are composed of both masculine and feminine essences, with one essence being the consciously dominant one in an individual, and the other being relatively unconscious, “appearing” as the qualities one desires or despises in others. In Jungian psychology, this is the basic mechanism of attraction: the recognition of the other half of ourselves in others, facilitated through projection and imagination. The illusion being that what you search for or recognize is outside of yourself, when it is really the opposite, less conscious side of your inner nature – the masculine or feminine – seeking consciousness through your interaction with others.

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