And then I met him and I just **knew**
And then I met him
And I just **knew**
Is NOT my story
I can literally feel that way about anyone I meet
My dad and I were joking the other day that we fall in love just walking down the street
The falling in love is easy for me
I could fall in love with anything if the moment is right
I always meet someone
And I always
**know**
The problem is
What is it that I actually know?
The truth
(For me)
Is that I know that it is right for me in this moment
There is something that strikes me, that opens me, that tells me
YES
This
Now
But it’s this story
The story that ONE DAY
(As in - it clearly hasn’t happened yet because I don’t have a husband..)
I will meet
HIM
And THEN
I will REALLLLY KNOW
Not like all those other times where I only thought I knew
It’s this story
That gets me fucked up
Because somehow,
*Knowing*
In the moment
Is supposed to last forever
One moment is supposed to tell me about a lifetime
…
It can also be true that a knowing is not lifelong
In fact
Most knowings aren’t
Mostly
Knowings are just the thing that takes you to the next knowing
A new knowing that might be completely different from the previous one
It might even seem counter to it
And perhaps
This is not called changing your mind
Or making the wrong choice
Perhaps
This is just how knowings go
They change
I remember telling a friend after I met my boyfriend in Chile (I studied abroad there when I was 20)
That it was love at first sight
5 months later we broke up and I was getting ready to head back to the states
And that friend said
“So much for love at first sight, huh?”
Why?
It can’t be love because it changed?
It can’t be love because it doesn’t match a fantasy love story?
Nothing against the fantasy love stories that people experience
But why are we using that to convince ourselves and each other that what we had wasn’t real?
A few days ago I read a really beautiful post by @haileymarino, sharing about her break up, and how she wished she had shared when she was falling in love
And my friend @danafares and I have been talking about why it is that women wait to tell people they are pregnant for fear of miscarriage
And having to be seen in the disappointment
(Or the perceived failure)
And we do this
Don’t we
We wait until we know it’s “real”
(Meaning… permanent?)
To share
And then we suffer the disappointment solo.
But don’t we want
(Maybe more than anything)
To be seen and loved in our most devastating disappointments?
Don’t we want our hearts to be held when they break?
Letting ourselves be seen in our pain
(And perhaps equally, in our hope)
Is not easy
But isn’t it actually why we are here?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot
As I witness myself falling in love
Wanting to share about my life honestly as I always do
Experiencing the fear around the unknown of how permanent or not this love is
I’m not as high in fantasy as I have been in the past
But I have my moments
And it’s really when the fantasy kicks in
That I start to worry
Maybe none of this is real
Maybe I never *knew*
Maybe I can never trust my knowing
Maybe it’s always wrong
And it’s there that I worry about being seen
I worry that you will see that I got fooled
You will see how wrong I actually was
But of course
None of it is wrong
And also none of it is right
It’s real simply because it’s happening
And also
None of it is real
Not in that permanent certain way we want it to be
So
I’m falling in love
Sometimes I float into fantasy
Sometimes I sink into doomsday
Sometimes I think we are perfect together
Sometimes I think this for surrre isn’t gonna work
Sometimes I drop into the perfection of the moment with nothing attached
Sometimes my mind gets hooked on something and can’t let it go
Sometimes we have these deep, mutual, soul shifting conversations where we both hear each other on another level
And sometimes we whine at each other and nothing really gets said, or heard
I don’t know anything about the lifeline of this love
I don’t know anything about what it will bring or what it won’t
I don’t know if I will want it to end, or if I will feel trapped, or I will get betrayed or if I will hurt him
I don’t know.
But I know that I’m falling in love
And it’s real because it’s here now
And it will change when it changes