Dare to Love Completely

Today's title derives from my recent exposure to that most honored sage: a Dove chocolate wrapper. Considering that my girlfriends all acquired shiny bits of tin with such advice as "You deserve a bubble bath," I think there may be a little fate involved.

Still, I'm not sure how good that advice is. I'm that idiot who does dare to love completely, every now and then. Now approaching the ripe old age of 30, I'm not sure that I want to take my chocolate's advice anymore.

Not that I think there's necessarily anything I can do about it. Knowing that so much of what we feel is chemical, I suppose it's possible that I'm merely hard-wired to spring open the hinges of my ribs when I'm in love with someone.

Look at how my lungs breathe. My heart pumps blood like this. Do you like it? Could you love it? Please try.

When I was last talking to a friend of mine, we mentioned about something like this. He says he tends to compartmentalize himself, and on his separate continent, has been thinking of all the things he has and hasn't told me about himself. It seems he's making an attempt to decompartmentalize in a rush of stories like needles, like breezes, although to what end, who knows.

I work that way about ninety-nine percent of the time, parceling myself into little glass boxes, but now and then I feel compelled for some reason to allow no walls between myself and someone else. They can walk around in my backyard at 2 a.m. They can paint my house different colors, enter my bathroom without knocking. I'm starting to think, though, that I have some magical ability to choose exactly the person who will guilelessly come in, assess his surroundings, and then spill his drinks on the carpets and break the mirrors, all on accident.

And there is this. When I'm not eating or sleeping and drifting from one end of my day to the other like a ghost of myself, sometimes my friends invite themselves over to my house wielding pizzas and cheesecake and make me watch The Princess Bride with them over a table full of red and silver bits of foil. I actually eat, and we drink several bottles of wine together. We dare to love, if only in pieces.

We laugh until it aches a little.

The Year of Living Ferociously

When we last left off in our story, my long-term non-boyfriend had unveiled information so painful to me that I wanted to hammer my heart shut.

And then it got worse.

The day after Christmas, he called to say that he was going to England for a week or two months, or however long.

"Fine," I said. "I could use a break."

"What an awful thing to say," he replied.

Then, he called me from London, asked if I still felt wrecked.

I did.

He wanted to know my New Year's plans, and I said I'd be alone, wallowing and drinking, as usual. He said he was skipping some wild party to catch a train out to Wales, to be alone by the ocean. It wasn't good news, but did I want to know why?

Punch me, I said. Go ahead.

So he told me. His last medical tests showed there was a good chance his stomach cancer had come back. He'd tried to tell me a dozen times before. He didn't tell anyone else, not even his family.

There's a very good chance he's going to die. He told me that, too. I checked the statistics, and I'm afraid he's not exaggerating.

He also says it would be foolish for me to go to London, in case you were wondering.

While I was driving through the night to my parents' house, I had decided that this would be the Year of Living Ferociously. To flee my rural Virginian outpost. To explore strange and new locations, to aim for goals I didn't think I could achieve. To write and live and love as if on the edge of a precipice.

And now I'm so full of rage and sorrow that I don't know what to do but attack, build up my muscles, to hone the razor's edge inside myself. To become as beautiful and dangerous and sharp as I always dreamed I would be.

And staring down this cliff, dizzy, face in the wind, I'm surprised. There's nothing holding me, but I know I'm not going to fall.