I’ve often failed at Love, and it’s such cruel irony that perhaps the greatest gift of all is often the most rejected. Even more cruelly ironic is that Love is often used as the best excuse we have for doing evil deeds. Love is often what leads us to lie, cheat, deceive, and suffer.

I’m quite guilty myself of stoking false fires and telling petty lies just to get a little comfort for myself in a trying time. At one point in my young adult life, I felt I’d be fibbing away forever for the rest of my days. True happiness seemed just a concept I’d never realize, floating away into the ether.

The use of lies as a bonding agent is all too common, and it’s sometimes even considered socially permissible, if the reward seems good enough to justify them. Some people seem to have golden tongues, speaking just the right words, false as they may be. But when said to the right people, they have a hypnotizing effect, leading to nights we’ll never forget, even when we wish we could. 

Even when we do fall in love, with the passage of Time, we sometimes forget what it was all about. It’s much too late when we end up remembering too much how we got to the point where passion overcame thought, captured our convictions; then in too short a time, it would leave us out to dry, aching and thirsting for the bliss we thought would last indefinitely. It doesn’t matter how or why things went wrong, because most often the answer is that they were never meant to be at all.

I’ve known more than a few lovers who have a golden touch. Sometimes that touch lasts for years at a time. It took me much too long to figure out that it wasn’t me, it wasn’t her, and for some of you, it may not be him. For me, there’s no doubt that she once knew Love, but over time she became little more than Lust taking on an angelic shroud, corrupting and subverting the beauty of unbridled joy into little more than an animalistic drive for mating.

We, as reasonable beings, should be able to derive one another’s unique place in the realm of humankind from this connection. We shouldn’t just be seeking another way to derive some basic pleasure from the warmth and connection with another wandering soul.

In this world where we’re each pressured to find our own little niche, we’re always seeking out someone with a peculiar specialty, that special one who knows how to love us just right. When the dark falls, we fear being alone, needing someone beside us to love us in the darkness, both outside and within.

It doesn’t matter if the passion we share is really for one another; oftentimes what we mistake for Love is simply a sense of accomplishment that we managed to spend one more night without the bitter chill of lonely idleness, which too often joins our uncomfortable times of solitude.

My bite has never been a match for my bark; perhaps this is why I seemed to never make quite the right connection with those whom I was attracted to, as they clearly didn’t share my interest. Many of them were quite unafraid to vocalize their disgust with my interest, and at times, very presence. While I’d eventually find what we often think of as “The One,” it took decades of my heart breaking into smaller, finer fragments that required some strong convictions as bonding agents to make my vital organs functional again.

Even when I was first convinced I’d found True Love, it took me the course of a couple calendar years to realize I was a victim of a well-played subterfuge. I would stay up all night asking myself how I could have been so foolish. I kept wondering where I failed, what I couldn’t provide. As the one I thought I’d spent the rest of my life with strayed, for too long I stayed. But I knew for sure we would never be level with one another again.

I will never forget that betrayal, and it took me the better part of two years to come to terms with strong feelings of abandonment, anger, hatred, and jealousy. More recently, the sum of these feelings transformed into a calm, but omnipresent bitterness towards almost every person I once cared for, thanks to being so thoughtlessly spurned.

While I will never forget the parting calls of those who claimed to care for me, I know now they were all lies. I’m most fortunate to have now found a true, loving, caring soul, but I know this is untrue for too many of you reading this. There’s no salve for the wounds or crutches sturdy enough to keep me standing tall. I’ll just keep on thinking and remembering too much, ad infinitum. Indeed, some lies become our truth, whether we like it or not.

~ Amelia Desertsong