I'm struck tonight by how very hard it is to truly love someone. I mean, really love them, not just say the words, or get that giddy rush of electricity or even the weakness in the knees when you see them. Love, real love, deep love, lasting love. The love that forsakes not only "all others" as in the traditional wedding vows, but forsakes self as well. The love that means erasing self. Not putting the other person's needs and wants first but still keeping that secret scorecard, that tally of the soul that says, "so, I did this thing for him/her, so s/he owes me something in return." Is that love? I don't think so. That's love's cousin, maybe.
But love, real love, means dying to what I want --- more than that, dying to what I need in order to live -- for him, no scorecards, no tallies, no "I rubbed your back, so now you should buy me chocolates", no "I really need just to hear your voice". I can't even let him know that I have needs now. In order to do what he has to do, he has to believe that I'm just jim dandy, right as rain, fine as a fiddler's fuck. And I'm so NOT any of that.
I feel like I'm lying to him. And I am.
Does it make lying all right if I'm doing it because if I don't, he'll worry about me when he should be keeping his head down since there are people all around who would just as soon kill him on camera as breathe? I can stand being away from him. Really, I can. I adore him, after 40 years he really does still make me go all woggy and weak-kneed when he looks at me in that certain way, but I can stand being away from him for six months. I can handle having to take on all the nitty-gritty stuff of life he's handled for years, the bills, the bank statements, even making sure the oil is changed in the car. Can I stand lying to him for that long? Can I keep up the facade? Can I manage to convince him that I'm holding up just fine?
It's not like I'm worrying about what he might do while he's there -- I told him, and meant it and he knows I meant it, that whatever he needs to do to relieve stress is fine with me, that I want him to be able to cope with being in a damned war zone. It's not even that I sit around and worry that he might be getting shot at or the camp might be being overrun - though those are possible.
But I'm not accustomed to lying to him. Not like this. Doing without him, that I'm used to. God knows that even when he's been here, he hasn't been *here*, present, involved, engaged with me. Not for years, not even for decades. But that was different. That was more or less, "well, OK, he doesn't see the world the way I do" kind of stuff. That was allowing him to be who he is, not making demands on him that he's not capable of meeting.
This ... this is way different. I don't know that I could explain it, really. All that other stuff was more like compartmentalizing, finding companionship in other ways, even intimacy without the physical stuff. Like being sawn into jigsaw puzzle pieces, some of which connected to him and some of which didn't. Now ... it's like having to hide the edge pieces from him, or the box top with the picture on it, or hell, even the fact that there's a puzzle I'm working on. Have you ever tried to gather up puzzle pieces and slip them away because someone - maybe a toddler who would get into them and lose them - was coming over? And yet still keep the bits you've put together, together, and the other pieces you've painstakingly sorted, sorted, all while hiding the fact that you even KNOW what a jigsaw puzzle is??? That's what I'm having to do.
And I do it for love, not to protect some secret. I do it because it's what HE needs. What I need is so very unimportant.
But I am so afraid I can't keep this up. God help me, I cannot fail this man. I must not fail this man.
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