this happy again

The other day I was talking to a friend. He’s in love for the first time, the real kind, the kind that leaves you different than it found you. “do you think that being in love feels like being at red rocks? do you think it feels like hiking and driving with the windows down in the summer in the mountains?”

I do. I tell him, I do.

I’ve loved and lost three great loves so far in this life, I tell him. Three humans I thought I could not live without. Relationships where my identity briefly merged with someone else’s creating a purple where there once was red and blue. Times I re-learned who I was and what I wanted and where I wanted to go next. Times when I felt contagious ecstatic love akin to live music and alpine trees and summer sun on your face.

Times when I moved on.

I tell him to settle for nothing less, and trust that any heartbreak endured is penance paid for a love someday that won’t betray him.

Something happened the other day when I was watching the videos I took of my life in July. The first couple times I watched them, I focused on what I thought other people would like. But the more I worked on it, the less it became for them, and more for me. I watched as the screen filled for literal minutes with the things and people and animals that I love.

I’m overwhelmed with the feeling that I could never be this happy again.

Ah, what a reminder.

I can’t help but remember the other times in my life that I thought I would never feel happy again. When those intersections of lives would come to an end. These are the times I try to tell my friend about, that he too will survive this war, this death of who he is now. I remember every slow cold hour spent dissecting my life from the bones and body of someone else’s. Abandoning my deodorant on the bookcase at his house, tossing out the candle that smells like life with him. Ghosts haunting the blocks around my apartment. I still have the mascara stains from crying over one on the driver’s side seat of my car ten years ago.

I want to tell my friend that someday I think he’s going to be okay. That one day it won’t hurt like it does now.

That someday he might take a video of a July in his life, and realize that right here, this pain -- it is exactly where he was supposed to be. I want to tell him that if he watched his video now, of a July in the future, the screen would be filled with strangers. They would turn out to be the greatest lovers and friends of his life. That love would feel like concerts at Red Rocks and hiking and driving mountain roads in the summer with the windows down. That there’s one worth waiting for.