Sparkles

Most people experience a stagnant stage in their lives at one point or another. It may be feeling stuck at work with no place to move forward or grow. For me, it's a love trap. It's not that I am trapped from others or from growth, but trapped in a comfort zone. And this space is a scary and dangerous one. There comes a time in most relationships when the sparkle getter dimmer, the passion is replaced with passive involvement and a small red flag appears in the corner of your peripheral vision that can't be flicked away or removed.

These are the times I look back at all the things we have done, been through, created, planned, worked for, laughed at, cried for, challenged each other to, sacrificed, enjoyed, experienced and gotten through with each others' strength. It seems quite close to impossible to imagine a life alone. Although, alone would even be bearable compared to knowing a life with someone who knows your soul and then having that taken away.

Is it better to have loved and lost it than to never have known love at all? I think a bleeding heart is worse than an ignorant one.

It's a difficult place to sit when your happiness is not truly fulfilled, but at the same time you cannot imagine a life without your lover. How does one bring back something from the past in order to progress to the future? How can the sparkle reset when you've reached a destination of utter apathy? What is absent that allows the stagnant smog to settle in its' place? And most importantly, how on the earth do married couples keep their affection so strong for forty or sixty years?

The problem is not the lack of love. I've never known a love like the one I feel now and since day one of meeting. I couldn't care for him more than I already do, I'd take a bullet for him without a second of hesitation. But I know that once your relationship turns into a friendship, it's complicated and hard to turn it back. Relighting a flame without any matches when it's been raining for weeks, tends to weaken motivation and cause many tears of frustration.

I want to be that old granny sitting on the park bench next to her husband and sharing a box of grapes (although I hear grapes don't gel with old age digestion). I want to know when I walk down the aisle that I'm never going down there again because the man at the end worships me and will do forever. I want to make my love last a lifetime, without feeling for one minute that it's not returned. I need to know those things are possible. So how can my flame be dying out when I'm not even nearly close to ready to saying goodbye?

Someone hand me a box of matches.