Love...it's exciting and new...

This morning was a great wake-up. To be able to roll over and cuddle up in those final few minutes before climbing out of bed. I have been married to my best friend for almost thirteen years. We've known each other for nineteen years, and even after all this time, there is no one else in the world I want to spend time with as much as I do him? We've been through a lot of difficult times together, and yet even through the toughest of them we managed to come out of them even closer than we were before. That is love.

What got me thinking about love is the interaction between two of the charcters in the current story I am working on. A male cybernetic being is talking to a human woman about love and death. She mentions that her husband died before war broke out, shot by terrorists in the park, and had she not shortly thereafter discovered that she was pregnant, she would have taken her own life. She tells him that now if anything ever happened to her son... if it ever came down to it, she would throw her life down without a second thought to save his. He is perplexed by this, not able to process the notion of love being strong enough to dictate the outcome of one's life, but for some people it really is that strong. Romeo and Juliet... suicidal at the mere thought of one losing the other. Characters in a story, yes, but as Oscar Wilde once said, "Life imitates art fare more than art imitates life."

Love is such a powerful force. Those five words seem limp as three day old lettuce in comparison to the actual power of love. When I sit down and try to imagine what my life might have been with him in it, I seem nothing. No him would mean that the child I have now would never have come into being, and thinking about a life without either of those two people just isn't something I like to do.

The funny thing is, we were destined to be together. I truly believe that. We met at the local mall while I was still in high school. He had only just come back from living in Los Angeles. Being a giggling teenager, I and my friend Liz followed him and his friend Andy around the mall for about an hour before we finally followed them out one of the exits, pretending we were going to our car. He came after us. Being incredibly shy, it was a feat for him that only fate could have pushed. He came over and gave me his phone number and the next day we talked on the phone for six hours before he finally convinced his friend to drive down to see me. That night before he left, he kissed me for the first time and told me that he could already see himself spending the rest of his life with me... like we had known each other for an eternity.

I don't like to think about what my life would be like without having ever met him. There were times in the past when things seemed tough that I thought maybe we both would have been better off had we never met, but I know better now. Life's experiences, the ones that we lay on our deathbed contemplating, it's those types of experiences I want to be thinking about. How I was blessed enough to have loved so deeply, to have been loved so deeply... how that no matter how low I felt because of things I had been through, or how badly I felt about myself, there was someone there for me who couldn't see all of those flaws I thought were fatal. And if he did see them, he could see through them, into the person that I really was, and that was who he loved.

I think about all of the people who never find love... who marry out of loneliness only to find themselves even more miserable than they were when they were alone... who marry because their parents' made a choice for them before they were even old enough to think about their own future, and it makes me very sad. Sure, some of those people fall in love. I am reminded of the scene in Fiddler on the Roof (yes, life imitates art, yet again,) when Tevye comes home and asks Golda, "Do you love me?" It seems an absurd question to her. Their relationship has gone on so long that they no longer thought about love the way the young do, but it was there nonetheless. Despite having an arranged marriage, over time they came to love one another very deeply, but not everyone is so lucky.

So when I think about how lucky I am, I don't gloat, but I do treasure it, and I hope that everyone in the world can experience the kind of love that I have been fortunate enough to know. It makes the world go around. Some days it may seem like money, war, hatred and greed are what spin the globe, but that's what the media would like us to believe. They want us to dwell on the gloom and the sorrow, but there is beauty and wonder out there yet.

There are people who are filled with love and hope, and in the end I feel very strongly that love will triumph over all this darkness. Maybe I've read too many fairy tales, but that's what I believe. The strength and power in love is more powerful than hate, it's just easier to sink into hate when things feel dark.

Love. It's the order of the day.

Oh yeah, and GO STEELERS!