Max is NOW!

I really don’t think I believe in love.
Not because I’m single, not because I’m a cynic, and especially not because I have been “burned” in the past.

This is a hard thing for people to hear. But, since I am not currently in any romantic entanglements, I think I can say it aloud and not fear the pain of anyone. I don’t believe in love, but it’s not because I’m bitter. Quite the opposite really. I feel like this on the best days, when I have the most positive clarity.

Perhaps it all goes back to my relationship with God. Most of my current acquantances find it odd when I tell them that I’ve worked for a christian summer camp, and further, a church. I was once called a christian. It was a title very dear to predicating my existence. At one point, in the height of my religious furver I think it was the one term I would use even above my name. “Hello, I am christian.” The weather changed, though, and so did the temperature of my heart. Although I had a large investiment in my religious self, he too began to melt away. I stopped using the word christian towards myself, then I stopped doing anything with that term even attached to it. There were many reasons, but none so effective as that I simply didn’t want to be one anymore. So I fell out of the good graces of the church, of many of my friends, and quite a few others, and I forgot about God all-together eventually. It hurt me too much when I would remember, so I learned very quickly to forget. I learned so well, that even today it’s hard to remember the situations and feelings I had just 6 years ago. And from these days, I think I became a different person. Not just because I no longer used the word christian to describe myself, but because I walked away from the first relationship I ever used the word love to describe.

I loved God.
I know that sounds wierd to people who have no history of religious involvement. Hell, it even sounds wierd to me now. Point is, I loved God. Not like I would love a woman or my friends, but it was love. It was deep and meaningful. At one point I would have given up everything I was for that love. I would have joined the monks in a life of silent solitude…or worse.

And I walked away from that, without a second thought.
I felt comfortable and secure and right, I felt like I was in the right place at the right time. And I left that behind… only to find that now I feel like I’m in the right place at the wrong time.

Do I miss God? No.
Do I miss caring about something bigger than myself? Every day.
Do I miss having a passion that would push me beyond anything I was? Yea, a lot.

But, it’s gone. And there is no turning back now.

I fell out of love. And this is the history of me. This is why I don’t believe in love. Because I have felt an intangible emotion only for an intangible being. And much the same as when I wiped the misty illusion of that being from my sight, I also wiped away the love I held for it. I wiped away who I was and what I would become. I wiped away everything, in a sense.

And then, in the sobreity of godlessness and lovelessness, I forgot it all. In hopes that one day I wouldn’t wake in the middle of the night and be struck by my lack, my half-self. The part of my that continues, remembering, the part of me that died.

So, I don’t believe in love. I cannot, really.
But it’s not all that bad. I think I would like to travel and experience the different people and the different ways. See what the world has to offer an orphan of love.