On the drive home...

Beer makes you sleepy... and think too much!

I realise this after I squeeze my way out of a bar, hug my mates goodnight and amble down Tottenham Court Road towards the Tube station under a blanket of lethargy. I manage around 100 metres and then succumb to the soft leather seats of one of the black cabs parked along the road. Remarkable how cleverly those little devils position themselves on route to public transport from a watering hole... Cheeky b*stards!

I lie back on the seat and close my eyes, and somewhere between the on-off-on-'n'-doze, my mind goes a-wandering... and it settles now on a little question has been eating away at me for the last week or so. Maybe you can help me with it Reader!

Tell me: Can you ever learn to love and trust someone all over again?

A little over year or so ago, I wrote a little song. It was a tribute I had written to eight years of love and longing across space and time between me and the person I had hoped to spend the rest of my life with.

Tonight I recall that wintry fall

when I fell in love and I knew

that only you were what I'd been waiting forever for

to fall in love all over again.

The way that your eyes reflected the skies

and brightened up every room, and made everything bloom all around me, as far as I could see...

I'd fall in love all over again...

How much of Love is Trust? Is one the product of the other?

Someone once told me that if you love someone, you can decide to trust them i.e. that love creates the decision to trust. The question is whether Trust can create the decision to Love. I have always believed that you can trust someone and love them but they don't go together necessarily - you have to build Trust but Love is unexplainable... you simply know it's there.

I have been thinking of my mother and father recently. Thirty years of marriage have welded them in symbiosis. What started off as an arranged marriage between two very different people, has probably concluded in what I could cynically call a "collaborative companionship", and yet, there is no mistaking the depth of feeling and tenderness between them whenever I see them together. The only word I have to describe that magic would be "Love". When I asked my mother if she loved my father when they first got married, she answered truthfully, "I learned to love him." In her case, Love seemed to be a decision, and as much of a decision as I believe Trust is.

What happens when Trust is broken? Does Love automatically die with it, or does it remain in some desperate form - straining against the weight of reality and clinging on to fragments of history? If I can will myself to Trust, can I will myself to Love?

So how do we know, just where we may go?

Does the way we've come so far give a clue?

For every goodbye and every Hello,

just promise me one thing that we'd do:

That through each passing year, cloudy or clear

we'd hold to what we know is true, and me and you

together, we'd outdo the weather.

We'd fall in love all over again....

I write these words down, and stretch them out in front of me - a jigsaw of investigation... but behind all the intellectualising and shotgun-philosophy, I am aware that the truth that really matters in all this confusion is my heart - and my heart is simple. My heart does not intellectualise and at this point in time it tells me the truth.

It tells me that I am afraid.

Afraid to trust, and afraid to love. Afraid because I have been hurt, and afraid because it's a horrible thing to be hurt by someone you trust.

Still I know in the deepest part of myself that even if it cannot be willed, Love means exposing yourself to the pain of being hurt, and possibly deeply hurt by someone you trust. It is no wonder that the term is "falling in love" - for there is a helpless abandonment of reason and calculation and a recognition that you will lose control. It is a terrifying surrender to not-knowing how and when and why, but simply letting go.

So Reader, let's put away all this philosophic contention of what constitutes Love and Trust. The real question is whether I dare to fall - Fall and possibly get hurt.

Well, I know one sure fire way to pump up the dare-devil in you and me Reader! What say we get out of this taxi at the next pub and get another pint just before we try the bungees over Canary Wharf!?

~~~

You, Me and that beer at East Coast...

It's 5.30 on a Sunday morning, and I am fresh off the plane and my skin is sticky with home. I unpacked my suitcase in two minutes flat, but I know I will need more time to do the same with these thoughts of You, Me and that beer by the beach at East Coast tonight.

Four months or so ago, I started this blog with a throat-choked-thank-you to everyone I was leaving behind. Tonight I look through the posts on this journal and recognise a concatenation of events... an unconsciously created circularity. Four months ago, the riverman~~~ sailed away - a contradiction of feelings, and very much uncertain if what she was doing was what she wanted to do. Tonight I try to untangle those same thoughts... those "should-I-and-should-I-knots" that I procrastinatingly-pocketed over the last ten weeks while I threw myself into the throng and traffic of new faces and places.

And now as I sit huddled in a blanket of jet-lag in my old bedroom, I know I finally can think. And because "to everything there is a season... a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away..." I know that as surely as there is a time for me to ask questions, there will be a time when those questions will be answered.

And what about You and Me?

Sitting down with You by the beach with cans of beer can throw everything into perspective and remind me of things unsaid and undone... and of priorities, principles and ideals. Isn't it wonderful that after all these years and after all the changes in hairstyles and spectacle frame sizes, we remain the same underneath it all?!

You asked me early this morning if I felt it was surreal being home again. I shrugged my shoulders and grinned and told You that it was not. But if there is any strangeness at all, it is this: that under all the brash change I feel around me and I know you have gone through in my absence, I still recognise You when I come home.

And those foolish and special things we talked and laughed about tonight, simply make me realise what I am now...

...and that whenever I come home to You, I also come home to Me.

Thank You for bringing Me home!

~~~