Love and Fiction
February 15, 2010
by Susan Boring
I wasn't looking for love when We found Us. I had just left a marriage of nearly a decade, and moved back to my hometown. I was looking to make new friends, and he just thought he was meeting "a cool lesbian" from an online networking site. When I happened across his profile, nothing particularly piqued my interest. If anything, he mentioned several aspects of himself that have always been to my disliking. His taste in violent movies and first-person-shooter games. His favorite authors and types of music. His disdain for humanity. Yet still, I was compelled to email him. We exchanged messages about lemurs and nonsense. We made each other laugh. He answered his phone with "Parole Office". There was a familiarity from the start, and we found ourselves meeting up at a nearby park that same day. We would know each other by the giant convenience store beverages in hand. It was the beginning of August, in Missouri, and disgustingly hot and humid. We greeted each other with a huge hug and both thought, "Whoa. What?!"
The second day we were together, I remembered a piece of fiction I had written a couple months before I moved back, before I even knew I would. When I wrote it, I thought it was a vision of my life decades down the road. I thought it was about me and a friend of mine. Then Brad shows up, matching the same physical description and having just moved to Kansas City after a few months stay in the exact same town my friend lives in. That made my head spin. As I pulled Brad in front of the computer and had him read the piece, he asked when I had written it. I pointed out the date. My work of fiction wasn't fiction at all. It was the story of our first evening together.
On this "holiday" where people celebrate love and all that it entails, I don't just think about romantic love - I think about all the forms of love I am blessed with in my life. And I know the reason I continue to find unconditional love and acceptance and "good, deep, lovin' friendships" is simply because I am open to receive, and willing to give. We all have baggage and have felt like damaged goods on occasion. But building walls not only keeps others out, it traps us in.
I just want to encourage all of you to break down some of those walls this week. You never know where the road outside will take you.