Monday, July 22, 2013

What's On My Mind in the Middle of the Night

So I was up last week thinking. Yep it's 1:30am, and I'm just sitting in my bed after a long day at work with my TV off...thinking. I should've been asleep a long time ago, because "The One" brings our son to my house early in the mornings so she can go to work. I make breakfast (sometimes he makes it himself while I get ready), he goes back to bed for a couple of hours, he goes to his camp, then I go to work. At the end of the day, I pick up our son from camp, take him to his baseball practice or game, then take him home (I need his mom to have as much of a break from him as possible). If I have a meeting or a rehearsal to attend, then she meets me at his practice or game to take him home from there. I call all of this "The Summertime Scramble", but its a method that the three of us have been able to pull off without a hitch so far. Now I don’t know why I was thinking about anything other than sheep jumping over a wooden fence this late at night, but I thought about Love...my Love to be exact. In my very sleep deprived mind I thought to myself, if my Love was a car, it would have a strong motor and a perfect transmission. Something that any person who knew cars would love to behold. Coated in chrome, spotless in all facets, and a remnant of good engineering for any that could appreciate it. But the body of that same car would be riddled with bullet holes, the wheels would have been stolen with the car on blocks, the windows busted, the paint peeling and rusted. And what's worst of all, the car wouldn’t be an old jalopy that had long been abandoned, but something close to new that just had been a victim of its environment.

Love at its core is a beautiful thing. It’s something that most of us (including myself) aim and aspire to. It’s what keeps us going out after that bad date, it's what helps motivate us to keep trying after that bad break up, and it's what gives us hope that “it’s gonna be ok”. Ahhh, beautiful Love! At its core, Love is what many of our grandparents had, some of our parents, and a few of our friends. It’s the stuff that is written about in books, and it powers the entire music industry. It's captured in paintings, talked about in poems, and exemplified in front of our eyes in movies (well the good ones at least). It truly is a thing of beauty to behold, it's just too bad you don’t see it that much anymore. I don’t know what has befallen us as a group, but male and female relationships these days are just abysmal. Men don’t trust women, and women are convinced that men are no good. Based on that, it's amazing that any one relationship actually works out. So again, all of this is running through my mind while I’m sitting in bed, thinking.

Now finally I start to focus my sleep deprived mind on me, the one and only Cakeboss, and my relationship with Love. I thought I knew her, but I really don’t know her that much at all. A lot of this was due to my own foolishness, but as a result, I’ve spend a good portion of my life dodging her, and she became foreign to me. She is like a homeless woman whom I don’t want to get near, but I bet if I took the time to know her, she probably has a heart of gold and is a sweetheart. Love has never been cool with me although I really wanted to know her. Whenever her name comes up on my phone…straight to voicemail she goes, because we have nothing to talk about. When I see her out on the street…I’m ducking into an alley. When she shows up at the party I just walked into…I’m making a quick escape out the back door. But why? Maybe it's because I’m selfish…maybe it's because I have a fear of commitment…maybe it's because I want to sow my royal oats, but as I'm coming up on 47 years old, how royal can my oats be? Or maybe it’s one of the other 3,521 reasons handed to “scared men”. Maybe I’m just jaded. Maybe when I see Love, all I see is the bullet ridden exterior that has been ripped to shreds, and am just not willing to invest the time and effort to fix it.

Or maybe, just maybe I’m waiting for "The One" to grab my hand as much as I want to grab hers, bring me to this shell of a former car and show me her view of the beauty that lies beneath. Then together we can restore her to the greatness she once was, and have something we can both be proud of. Then again, maybe I’m sitting in bed thinking just a little too much. I should really get some sleep…

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