Achin' To Be
When someone you love is hurting, of course you want to make the hurting stop. Of course you want to take it further and turn the hurt into happy.
You hurt too, but not like they hurt. Hurting through a proxy is a weak substitute, which is no substitute at all.
In times where you selfishly—but not necessarily ignobly—want to share in as much as possible, there are a string of desperate moments when the realization (but not yet acceptance) hits that you're just on separate horses, that the best you can do is hope for something approaching a parallel path.
The mind shrinks back from the prospect that some paths are too narrow to accommodate two such riders riding abreast (to say nothing of tortured analogy riding side-by-side to tortured soul).
Being a mere spectator is an option that disappeared a long time ago. There's no stopping the ride, either. No willfully choosing to just go wait at the finish line of a race you didn't even realize was a race in the first place.
My unfortunate over-emphasis on intellect as the Best Solution to most problems has colored my dreams about all of my Achin' To Be, all of my wanting to be near, my wanting to solve (goddammit!) the negativity.
But Life has never been a problem to solve; I'm only learning this now. Life is more and less than that. It's more than fodder for masturbatory intellectualism; and it's less than a well-known quantity or clearly delimited geography.
Life is merely that it is. That it happens, is happening, has happened. It's just base experience. We reach for different things along the way, but those things are the fruits (and banes) of life, not life itself.
I'm only realizing all of this because I've set my Intellectual Self off to do what it does best: solve a problem. Only the problem I gave it has no solution: "Why can't this be October and/or why can't this be Tucson?"
I love because I can do nothing else when it comes to him. The rest is just circumstance. I understand this now.