I started to write a tirade about the joys of love

I started to write a tirade about the joys of love, the gaining and loosing of it. The realization came to me halfway through the first paragraph that I was just venting spleen, spilling so much bile. Love, true love, is not deserving of that kind of attack.

Now, I know that I'm not the one to speak in depth about love. I've not been successful with that stuff. I know that there have been good people who loved me and tried to do the best they could for me. My failing is in reciprocation. A lover opens up to me but I cannot allow myself to be open. No matter how many words are spent in trying to reconcile this deficit, the reality of personal feelings take primacy.

How I would love, how I wish, how I hope that someday I could learn how, or unlearn how not to. Not to put too fine a point on it; I learned how to slaughter my fellow monkey at an early age and was good at it. I took pride in my job. Now I see those young men I fought and wonder at the love and passion I destroyed. Theirs and mine. I wonder at all the years I spent defending what I did, and now all the years regretting it. I wonder how I can live with me and how anyone else would want to.

On a cogitative level, I know that I was doing what had to be done, what my government asked of me in a war time environment. On an emotional level, the redneck, Christian Boy Scout that I used to be wants damned little to do with the man I am now. No matter how much I try to candy coat who I am with pretty words the reality still remains; I volunteered for the job, placed myself in combat, and had one hell of a good time.

I guess to love one must feel worthy of love. Love isn't so much giving love as allowing another to love you, the giving of yourself to another. If you feel unlovely, how can someone else see you as lovely? Can you trust that their perception is true? Will you question their motives? Will the ugliness of who I am come through in a moment of openness to be reviled by the one I opened up to? On many levels I just don't want to know.

I love my life now, the one I have with Avalon, my sloop, my home. It's my earliest and dearest of dreams. How appropriate that now, near the end of my life, I find my first dream. I would like to share it, but I don't know how. I'm not unique in this. I go to group meetings with other combat vets and listen to their issues and find that they are mine as well.

Our lives, like gods, demand a price. There is no escaping the past and no avoiding the future. What we were shape who we are and what we are shapes our world. The worst part of it is that we do this on an individual basis and then share it. But then again, isn't that what love is; we create who we are and then share that person with others on an intimate level. Ain't it fun to be human?

If this sounds like an apology, then maybe it is. I cannot help who I am and how I react to this world any more than another can. I can only be who I am, to be true to myself. All I can do is approach it with a sense of humor, to not take myself too seriously. I'm not alone in this. I am in a support group and it does help. Next time you see a vet, give him or her a hug and say thanks. It really does make a difference.

Gary Bush
gabochum@gmail.com
No one gets out of here alive, so live it like ya mean it.