Feeling Love

Recently while discussing her boyfriends and heartbreak with by young friend L, I found myself thinking about the nature of love and how the moments when I have most intensely experienced it bordered on pain. The birth of J was one of them. Holding her in my arms was a life changing experience. From being frail, vulnerable and unsure about what next in crumbling marriage, I went to feeling like I had some super-power that could not be contained. Yet there was no euphoria. A mundane analogy to describe it would be a dry faucet on a hot summer's day that suddenly starts to gush water furiously and will not stop. There comes a point after which thirst and need is satiated but the flood continues unabated. 

Thinking back that was my first contact with true love. It is hard to know what exactly to do with it. The second experience came much later in life and it was borne out of sharing the deepest pain, willingly letting myself experience another person's darkest days as if they were my own. Not knowing where exactly my life separated from theirs. There was a consuming sense of One much like the time I held the new born J to my heart. There was the same sense of invincible though the circumstances were very different. 

I was trying to explain to twenty year old L that it is not real love until you have experienced such connection with another person that it is no longer possible to separate part from whole; have no words to describe that limitless, unbounded feeling you experience because that person exists in your life.