Actual Love

Showers are such a wonderful moment in the day to rinse away the worries of sleep. Last night, I had terrible dreams about old men chasing me around & trying to capture me. Yuck! Dreaming of smelly old men telling me that they like my hair isn't exactly a night with Fabio. But, as I stood in the shower for an extra round of shampoo, I knew exactly what had caused it.

Yesterday, in a spring time effort to be fertile with ideas, responsible in actions, and hopefully in my career & business, I sent emails to former clients updating them on what I had been doing. At promptly three minutes after I sent an email to one particular male and older client (48 years of age isn't old in my book but this guy isn't Fabio), I got a response. My relationship with, as I shall call him from this point on, Mr. Ego, has been a tentative battle between work and dealing with his flirtations. I've invented boyfriends, should have told him I had girlfriends, and I even crept to the lowest of places by constantly being "sick" just to avoid him. But when the pressure is constantly having Mr. Ego want to ride you, well, all is fair. Mr. Ego isn't capable of understanding the word NO!

At the heart of our relationship, my writing and design services were selected by Mr. Ego in order to help him (this won't be a surprise) write his life memoir. I provided research, interviews, book structure, and _______________(list all the things that a book needs except the actual writing). Mr. Ego wanted the kudos of telling people that he had written the book, which he did, and I'm quite proud of having coached him well enough to get the first draft complete. Yet, it wasn't the work that was ever the problem, it was all the other moments in which he tried to woe or buy my affections. My family detested his constant advances. A real boyfriend that stepped into the picture for a moment wanted me to sue him for harassment. My friends wanted me to drop him as a client. Never the less, I got the first draft completed and I had other engagements to pursue.

Ten months later and since the start of the year, Mr. Ego has been leaving me messages about he looks like a new person since he lost his gut from spin classes and that he had written "awesome" new pages for the second draft of the book. Sickness, I swear it was the truth, and other projects had been preventing me from meeting with him. In the email I sent yesterday, I asked him to send the pages for a quick and gratis-free read. Then I read his email that stated he didn't want to email the pages because he really wanted to meet with me first. As Brunette as I am, I understand that if I meet him for lunch its not to read thirty pages at the table. Cough-Cough-excuse me, I'll can't make it.

I use Enjoy Conditioner this morning in my hair. I needed to hydrate my locks. As I stood there like a Matisse bather poised and staring into space, my thoughts kept bubbling.

My memory went back to the last significant relationship I had which was in Chicago. It was in the spring of 2003 that we went to the Esquire movie theater, on Oak Street. It's a spectacular movie theater because of the thousands of little yellow light bulbs that twinkle under the marquee. Stepping out of a movie from the Esquire feels like you've stepped into a new film. Oak street feels like a reproduction of some small brownstone street in New York. It keeps the movie buzz going. However, that night, some three years ago, we were watching Love Actually on the silver screen. The components of the film were at the point just the stuff of romantic comedies and dramas. Many people just didn't like the film.


Love Actually pitches its story line like this:

General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed-but I don't see that-seems to me that love is everywhere. Love actually is all around.

I was a great message for the 2003 holiday season. Yet, for me I knew that I actually wasn't in love with the man sitting next to me. Maybe it was because Hugh Grant was president or a writer fell in love with a woman he couldn't speak with, I realized I didn't love my boyfriend like I knew I should. The vibe wasn't there for me and it hadn't been there for the passing of nearly a year. Old habits die hard.

Before I just start sounding like a bitter and reminiscent Brunette, forgive me. But perhaps there is reason to my madness. In the web-like nature of relationships that people form, I'm always amazed by how people reach out for another or the grounds for reaching out to meet new people. Sometimes the grounds for meeting people are built on motivations like lust or need. Like an older man hitting on a younger woman or a younger woman hitting on an older man, the delicate web between the couple has a questionable underpinning, is it love or is it need? If I were more like certain Jane Austen characters, I might think that I should just marry the wealthier older man and be set for the rest of my life. Wrong. I just can't be force to be with people that I'm not in love with.

What then is love? I heard a man once describe to a group of people that love is like the arrival of a baby. It's brought from out of the mystery of life and it just is. Love at first sight is actual love, he said. Love isn't something that can be forced into existence. It has to be constantly fed and cradled. And it should begin with the gaze of one lover to another. I think that Lovers can feel instantly the territory that they are about to cross into when they lay eyes on another for the first time. I didn't need a man or a movie to point that out to me. Yet in all my nightmares and disappointments, I think that's how it should be. I just hate it when people are confused by lust or need and they attempt to force things into existence.

All of these thoughts were came and went as quick as the shampoo and conditioner of my hair. A momentary stop into the meaning of life. Now I had to face the day.