True Love: Like Fire or Like Home?

A few days ago, one of my closest friends and spirit sister posted a poll on Facebook about what true love feels like.

Side Note: I had no clue that one can use gifs for the Facebook polls. I will have to try that sometime.

Moving on.

The options given were fire or home. Not too many individuals chimed in. Perhaps they were busy seeing what ratchet was going on in the world. Maybe they were too stumped to answer. Maybe they just didn't care. Whatever the case, the end result was disappointing.

I was invited to chime in on her blog, along with some fellow writers I've networked and collaborated with in the past. Yet, I declined. It goes beyond not being able to summarize in a bullet point paragraph my thoughts. I have to peel back the personal layers, the core of me, to give my most authentic answer.

Here goes everything.

When I was growing up, I was exposed to two appearances that marked examples of true love. One was the union of my grandparents. Although communication was slight, I could tell there was a reverence for what each person served in the relationship, a mutual respect. There was comfort in the stability. The other was the way of my mother and the way of the world. My mother's spirit always rang restless: always on the move, forever searching. She flocked to whoever excited her and fled once that person no longer did it for her. When it was great, her desire to do whatever was needed to solidify her mate increased exponentially. When it was horrible, limitless were the means to which she would seek her own form of justice and vengeance. People I've met through life also operated with their own set of passion, whether displayed through possession, public displays of affection, as well as sex being the pinnacle of proof that it was love incarnate.

Was it fire, or was it home?

I've experienced relationships that rang with contentment. I was part of that crowd who had something (or someone) interesting to talk about. The discussions about intimacy I could not (and would not) dare bring up around my grandparents slid from my lips (and on paper) easily with females I considered comrades at the time. Because the roller coaster effect was absent, it echoed what I believed to be home.

Those few unions that were home on the outside felt a bit hotel-ish. Let me delve a bit deeper to see if this can make sense to you. Think of an Extended Stay Hotel. You know that it is a nice place to be and that it has all of the necessities for day-to-day activities. Yet, the feeling of belonging is absent because it isn't actually your primary residence. That is what some of them were. My heart was there doing its physical function, but the emotional glee which is gushed about in books or in movies was absent at best, manufactured at worst.

I had two romantic ventures where fire warmed my heart. The very first one was back in late 1999 but crashed a year later because we weren't on the same page in our relationship goals. The 2nd one was my marriage, whose death became official this year.

There was a brief yet possible spark with a person discovered in the pools of the dating market, but his words and his actions did not fully add up.

Oh, such a conundrum! Did the feeling of home lead to boredom and complacency? Did the feeling of fire lead to chaos and instability? Neither one of these could be accurate, yet it was my reality.

Was I being too greedy ... to want fire and home at the same time, within the same person?

For the longest, the answer was a booming yes.

These past few months, the universe has been sending different signals, like there is nothing wrong with the intersect of fire and home. Only time will tell if this current entity is just for a season or for a lifetime.

Peace.