A Love Letter as Prayer
Our definitions of love change along with our phases of life
I’m in love with one of my best friends, and we’ve never met. It’s true. We first started talking in an online forum for people who like fringe art and burlesque movements. She was already married, and happily too. While we were not close at first, we gradually began talking more,especially in the early morning hours each of us at our computers, chilling with our own ghosts.
She was living overseas at the time, due to her husband’s deployment; I was couch surfing up and down the eastern seaboard trying to find my way. We were both lonely, she for her homeland and me for a stable human.
I should clarify something right here and now: not once has our friendship gone to anything romantic or even remotely sexual, it simply exists as a type of love I cannot describe.
It is funny when you are a kid, and later a teen, you have definitions of what love is, all these ideas and failed hypotheses. You spend your nights wondering if what you are feeling is love, who will be the “weaker” one and admit feeling something. It starts off as a couple dates, then saying those three ugly words.This whole time your hormones are a torrent, pulling you every which way when really all you are wanting to do is get the other person naked, in order to feel like an adult.
As a young adult, love becomes finding someone you don’t get sick of when you go to the dining commons. Someone with whom you can rebel against college authority as you experiment with your emotions and what you are capable of now that you don’t have to hide everything from your parents. You begin to feel intimacy, laying in a bed all day on a Sunday afternoon, hearing the sounds our bodies make unintentionally, the morning breath, the belches, or sneezes at very inopportune times. Some of us even succeed in finding a partner to spend the rest of our twenties with. Others find several or none at all. We learn what it is to be young and in love, and we learn that the English language fails to describe it.
While I have never been one to form physical bonds with others, I am addicted to trying to find mental bonds with like-minded people and always surprises me with whom they develop. So it was with my friend.
At first we had very little in common. I am a very left-wing individual and she is more of the new libertarian type. I have no idea how to be an adult, she of course is married. When we met, I was obsessed with the abyss inside my own mind and she was a child of nature, but still we kept talking, desperate to talk to someone, anyone.. We eventually found things in common; we both enjoyed certain types of music, fashion and specific comic book characters.
When she had her child, I was too poor to buy her a gift, so I wrote her a poem (it’s in one of my horrible first books); when I was too far into the abyss she would pull me out,unintentionally sometimes.
We go for short windows of time without speaking, as most adult friends do, but then we come back to each other when one figures out that they need someone. She still takes time between her career and her family to listen to my rambling ideas for books and movies; she tells me of the art she wishes to create.
I sing to her on her birthday; she sends me simple hellos.
I have been in love before. I have known romantic love. I have been on both sides of one-sided relationships. I have experienced lust and desire, and jealousy and longing, but when it comes to her, all I feel is joy and warmth, even across the binary sea that divides us.
This is the love that I have discovered as I approach middle age: cherishing a person of the opposite sex without ever having a romantic desire. I have female friends, but the ones I am closest to are ones whom I had crushed on, or who for some reason had feelings for me. They are people who I fought for to be in my life no matter what, and kept no matter the heart ache.
This is a different kind of love, and honestly I think it is the best I have ever felt. No pressure, no regrets, no promises, no invisible bed, just an unbridled friendship and understanding between two people who have never met.
Today, she revealed to me that she is having a health scare. I am not a religious person, I am not spiritual, but in a way me sharing this is a way of saying a prayer for one of the people I adore most in this world.
I love you, my friend.