Boots Malone

What It’s Like to Be in Love
With Boots Malone


Going where your lover
guides you
Where she’s not sure she
wants you to go
But you go there anyway,
because you trust her
and you know she
wants you to go there
whether she realizes it or not

And you find it:
the energy source
behind the fire
off-limits
the place where
stars are born

You see Boots Malone
riding her horse
her hair blowing wildly
in the wind,
fearless
She waves to the camera
and gallops off
You are dying
for her to pat the
back of her saddle,
invite you on for
a ride.
But she doesn’t.
Not today.
She is too busy
waving
and riding off into the sunset.

They say it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I suppose, as trite as it sounds, that that is true. But sometimes I find it very hard to believe. Sometimes I hurt so much inside that truism seems downright laughable.

I suppose life is all about love and loss. Or lack of love and still loss. I don’t think we can ever escape the loss part, hard as we might try. But sadly I think it is true that some people, perhaps many people -- but hopefully not too many! -- never experience love in their lives. And that is so tragic it takes my breath away.

Sometimes we fall in love with the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. And still, at that moment in time, it seems like the most right thing in the world. We cannot reconcile within ourselves how something that feels so right can be so wrong. We are in the end utterly human, and we succumb to our humanness. Inevitably, such things end in utter, horrific disaster. Lives are ruined, or changed irrevocably. Sure, we can always pick up the pieces and move on. What choice do we have really? But nothing is ever the same.

I think about what it is like to love someone truly, madly, deeply. The phrase “lovesick” is so accurate. Imagine, suddenly finding yourself deep in the throes of passion and complete and utter devotion, when you have finally resigned yourself to never being capable of such deep feeling. All those years where you thought there was something wrong with you, not right. In reality, it was just another case of your trying, relentlessly, to fit that round peg into yet another square hole. And when one day – seemingly out of the blue -- you find the round hole that seems to be the perfect fit, you are completely blown away. Your nervous system is almost instantaneously overloaded and cannot handle – does not compute! – this most amazing, incredible, mind blowing, earth shattering… thing. There are no words to describe it really. And you end up resorting to time worn clichés.

Life as you know it has changed irrevocably. You can never go back.

To lose that amazingness – which, afterall, was something you never thought possible – can be more devastating than never knowing it at all.

Something that starts out with an innocent, fleeting, yet heartfelt thought: “I don’t want to go through life never having kissed X” can end in the kind of pain that rips your heart out of your chest and leaves a gaping, hollow, bloody cavity for all the world to see – only the world can’t see it. The world, cruelly, keeps on turning, just as it always has. And no one cares really that you, who has finally – without really asking for it or looking for it -- found love, has just as easily lost it again. Perhaps forever.

Yes, it is true, the passing of time does make the pain less intense. Less raw. Less bloody. But it never goes away completely. It is always there, lurking, popping up unexpectedly when you least expect it.

It does not make one so very eager to hop back up on one’s horse and try again, I have to say that earnestly. Does that make you a chicken? Perhaps. A very vulnerable, terrified of getting hurt again so deeply human for sure.

There are reasons why we do not invite pain into our lives. Life has enough pain without going out and looking for it.

Is there hope at the end of the tunnel? (Since we are using clichés so freely here, I might as well go for it!) Maybe. Maybe not.

All I know is that the only way you can tell you are still alive is when you get that feeling you are stepping off of a cliff and into the abyss.