The Case for Falling Madly In Love

Lovers find secret places

inside this violent world

where they make transactions

with beauty.

Reason says, Nonsense.

I have walked and measured the walls here.

There are no places like that.

Love says, There are.

— Rumi, from “Secret Places,” Bridge to the Soul: Journeys Into the Music and Silence of the Heart — as rendered by Coleman Barks

There are two images that are indelibly burned into my soul. The first was the cobalt blue light of dawn that cascaded over his body the first time he made love to me on the floor of his little flat amid a war zone. The second was the shadow of his body against the harsh light of a Dublin hostel lobby, one hand waving goodbye, as I drove away to the airport. Both of us were in a complete emotional breakdown. In between these two moments was approximately thirty days when I experienced one of the greatest loves of my life. Twenty three years later I can still mine those days for treasure at will. These thirty days are why I will always be a warrior for completely abandoning oneself to love.

I had landed back in Derry, Northern Ireland nearly a year after my young adult life had been thrown into a blender with the death of my beloved father. I had learned of his cancer while I was studying there the first semester of my senior year of college. My father went quickly after my return home. I then graduated, settled his estate over the summer, took some of my inheritance money and bought two plane tickets for my best friend and I to tour Europe through the fall. We would end in Derry and I would fly home right before Christmas to get back to my life of searing pain and big question marks. Or at least that was the plan, but a week before I was to leave Derry I made a deal with the universe. It was one of those all or nothing ultimatums. Give me a job, and a place to live, without any effort on my part, and I will not get on that plane. The universe called my bluff with precisely what I asked for. I called my loved ones and told them I wouldn’t be home for the first Christmas without my father. When they asked me when I would be home, I gave them the only thing I had to offer; one big question mark. I had plenty of those to spare.

The only answer I had been able to come up with, after I watched my dad take his final breaths scarcely an hour after I’d signed the papers to remove him from life support, was to go back to Derry. It wasn’t a clear, concise answer. It was more of a calling. Derry was the only place on the planet I could imagine not being emotionally dead to everything and everyone in my life. It was the last place I had been alive. I was twenty-two and thrust out into the world without the only person I had ever counted on for safety. The grief raging inside of me had completely consumed every other part of my emotional landscape. Derry was still a war zone, trying to emerge from thirty years of violent rebellion. A war zone felt like a perfect place for me to land, and it was.

Here’s the thing about a place that has been immersed in violence for a long period of time. It knows grief with the intimacy of a lover. I had made a few solid and warm relationships when I was studying in Derry the year before, but when I returned with this massive amount of grief in tow, I became one of their own. My first Christmas without my father, I was welcomed to my friend Colm’s family celebration as if I were a Celtic queen reborn to the earth, bringing with me the first magical snowfall Derry had seen in twenty years. In the following months I was allowed to be a mess. To drain six hot whiskeys every Monday night at Mullins. To be alone in my little room on Westend Park, stoned out of my mind listening to Champagne Supernova over and over again. I was able to sit at the feet of the Ireland’s most revered musicians and storytellers who sang of resilience amid sorrow. I heard wretched stories of loss that made me thankful for the relatively peaceful nature of my own. I could escape to the wild Irish countryside and know the power of eternal time. I was fed, housed, kept in drink, hash and endless cups of tea for months on end. I was thoroughly loved and slowly reopened my heart to feeling again. Derry taught me the only way to survive grief, is allow yourself to feel again in defiance of it. They showed me how to balance grief and love in a way those two things ultimately demand of a person who is to lead a healthy life.

As I approached the ninth month of my resurrection’s gestation, I knew I had to go home and answer some of those big questions I’d abandoned there. I’d left my first love hanging in the wind. My family was struggling through their own trauma; blowing up their lives in ways I didn’t know, but could only sense from the increasingly stronger pleas to come home. I settled on a date at the end of May and bought my ticket. I would take this open heart home for the summer; set my first love free, witness my second niece be born and see if I could piece together a life there without my father. That’s when the universe called my bluff for the second time.

I met him at one of his gigs by chance. (If chance is even an actual thing. My jury is still out on that debate.) I saw an ad in the Sunday paper for a show featuring the Screaming Bin Lids when I was out to my bestie’s parents’ house for Sunday dinner (which is actually lunch in Derry). ‘Screaming Bin Lids… that sounds interesting!’ I proclaimed. They were playing that night. Siobhan said, ‘Awk, that’s my friend Decky’s band, we should go to that,’ and so we did. Later he would tell me that this was the night ‘his dove had landed.’ He had been keeping track of me for months. He knew everything about me that he could without actually knowing me, all the while awaiting the moment when we would have our ‘chance’ encounter. Siobhan introduced us, we had a pleasant chat and made a tentative plan to meet a few nights later for a drink. Five weeks before my plane took off from Dublin.

I caught him walking down the street as I was walking up it. I was very late, and nonchalantly so, for our drink and he was on his way home. I called out to him and he walked over to me. That was it. We didn’t leave each other’s side for the next thirty days. We became completely consumed by each other. Barely sleeping because that would mean we weren’t dancing, talking, fucking and being madly in love. We knew we were on a clock and sleep seemed like a waste of precious time. I have never seen so many consecutive sunrises in my life.

I loved how he always grabbed my hand and walked a half step ahead of me as if to protect me and claim me as his own. Of course he didn’t need to claim me, I was completely his with every fiber of my being already, but something about his effort in this regard made me feel safe in the world. When I had to leave him to get a change of clothes, or check in with some friends, he would kiss me like it was the last kiss we were ever going to have. When I returned, he kissed me like someone had just given him a reprieve from a life sentence. We carried this light with us wherever we went. The happiness was contagious and dripping from us. Our love took on it’s own mythology, so much so that when I returned to Derry twenty years later a townswoman shook my hand, welcomed me back, and referred to me as ‘Decky’s Girl.’

He was, and still is, a powerful soul. He is a bard in both an ancient and current way; telling stories through song with sweet and brutal honesty that shift people’s minds. He was, and still is, completely devoted to the only thing that he has ever been able to count on not losing; his music. He was, and still is, fractured by everything he has seen die with his own eyes. And our time together was, and still is, living proof to me that love does conquer pain in that it provides the perfect, defiant counterbalance to it.

It was within these thirty days that I risked loving and losing it all again. In fact, I did it knowing that I was very likely going to lose. I let him take me completely and take care of me completely. I loved him with everything I had, and harvested parts of myself to give him that I didn’t even know were there.

Much of the relationship advice circling around these days advocates that we enter into relationships guarded; distrustful of our fanciful, yet ultimately unreliable emotions. Conventional wisdom states feelings are not love, love is the hard work that comes after feelings have dissipated. We’re told to be aware and educated about our trauma and all the fukced up ways it can manifest with love. We are advised to go slow, talk it out, ask ourselves and others the right questions. Evaluate, evaluate, evaluate; especially if we are invested in having eternal love. We are always pushed to construct the “forever love,” the one you stick with after the feelings are gone. We’re even told that if we buy into ‘falling madly in love’ we will never experience that real, eternal love because we’ll just be looking for the next feelings fix. Some may even read my story and write it off as such. After all, it was only thirty days.

In this respect we seem to hold only one kind of love, experienced in one kind of way, as the penultimate manifestation of love in one’s life. This platform is filled with articles about how to find and keep that kind of love. I suppose it is all very good advice. I believe I’ve even said some of it myself.

Yet, there is so much more. Two decades later I can say that those thirty days of my life have in some significant ways lasted forever and will continue to do so. It was neither a good or bad course of action. What it turned out being was exactly the path I needed at that moment in my life. I didn’t think about it. I just did it. I just went where my emotions led me. I trusted myself, and reclaimed my ability to feel and love from the grip of death. With him I learned how to say an unequivocal yes to love; messy, scary, all-consuming love. I also weathered everything that came as a result of it. This love changed me. It healed me and made me stronger, richer and grateful for having experienced it. In this way it is as valid as any other eternal love that I have or may experience with another, and yes I believe that you can, and will most likely have more than one.

We didn’t end in the traditional happily ever after fairy tale. We have had several more sweet hellos and sad goodbyes, as well as long silences. We have experienced great love with other people, but we have also kept a deep connection and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. It is still a source of inspiration for me.

This is the essential nature of love. It lives in the wild. It doesn’t conform to external control. It doesn’t show up with a pre-determined ROI. What love, any manifestation of love, asks for is only that it be acknowledged, honored and experienced fully in whatever way it arrives and chooses to live within you. Because if you don’t, you will never know what beautiful gifts it will leave when it eventually departs or what you would have missed becoming if you had just trusted yourself enough to show up for love when it showed up for you in all its beautiful, messy, emotional glory.