Ditto

Ditto. The words of "Unchained Melody" and the face of Patrick Swayze swim through my head. I may romanticize love a lot more than I should. Maybe that is my problem. I've always been a mooshy-romantic ever since I could walk. I've fought it harder than anyone I know but I can't completely kill the romantic monster that hides with in me.

As a kid I would always marry the boy doll to the girl doll right after they fell hopelessly in love. Falling in love was never far from my romantic mind. I played house, sometimes by myself and I used to make-up love scenes while I rode my bike(ie. motorcylce, horse, convertible) through the woods and around the neighborhood. The scenes always ended or began where someone always found me, rescued me, wanted me, fell in love with me.

I used to daydream up the most fantastical love scenes. I dreamed of being swept off my feet. Sometimes knights came for me, other times cowboys, bikers, rich men or one of the kids I was crushing on at church.

But its not easy for a little girl to openly be a romantic when she's surrounded by her rough-housing brothers.

So, I pushed the romantic away. I kept it locked it away. For the most part I denied that I believed in love. I won spitting contests, could sword fight any kid in the neighborhood, out-skated all the boys, believed tackling was ok in soccer and acted as though the idea of love were sickening.

The anti behavior became a true feeling, eventually. But, alas, I came to college and my raging hormones started to take full swing. This made it even harder to contain the romantic beast that continually exposed me to hopelessly romantic beatings. But I mistakenly tried falling in love and I usually succeeded but its difficult to truly fall in love when the other party is pitted against you.

And after each love affair ended I would promise that I'd still fight it. Even now I tend to scorn the loved and loving. I scorn them, not because I'm jealous but because I'm fighting it, fighting the hurt that I am bound to experience time and time again it seems when I reach for the love that so many others are blessed to have in their lives.

And so I continue to love in vain. But thats ok because I maintain the facade of not. I've denied having ever put any piece of my heart within in reach of a mans greasy, dirt-clogged, fingernailed hands but I did. I claimed it was lust but often times I really was feeling love--at least some degree of it.

I mean, how often will a girl climb into attics and pat down insulation for the man she loves? How often will she walk 1/2 a mile in negative degree weather to see the man she loves? But this man broke me and the man after that broke those broken pieces the one after that took those chipped pieces and ground them under the heel of his boot.

People kept telling me, "you're only twenty, you shouldn't be that hardened, that hurt and you shouldn't care so much about love and marriage." What does that even mean? Does this mean that I have no feeling? Does it mean that I am young and don't really deserve to fall in love? I keep denying and pushing the idea of love so far from me that I truly believe I can't find it or am afraid of what it will look like when I do. I don't think about it often, only at night when sleep evades me.

I even tried fighting love with lust in hopes of freeing my mind and getting a good nights sleep. It was when I was broken, crushed several times that I started making-out with a guy that looked like a puppet from the Labyrinth and whose name rhymed with Model--apparently I have a penchant for dating guys with weird names; at least, this one didn't have a girls name. I thought this would take me further from the idea of love and romance. I thought it would numb me and it did. I soon realized that I didn't like who I was becoming. You spend enough time around a hardened, numb man and you'll start acting like them. I soon learned I'd rather be alone and hurting then numb to feeling as he had become.

No matter how much I fight the romantic, its still there, still fighting. I have this unreasonable idea that anything can happen and if I'm doing everything exactly right then some man will look at me with adoration--not just lust--and I will return that look.

You can't break a romantics spirit, no matter how hard you try. Maybe be it won't happen today, maybe it won't happen this month, this year, this life but someday my prince will say "I love you" and I'll say "ditto."