LOVE WILL MAKE YOU DO CRAZY THINGS

I see mothers hustling and bustling around New York City. They carry heavy strollers down subway steps, run after an energetic two year old on a crowded street, and play in concrete playgrounds with barbed wire fencing around them.

 

And after all this I have to wonder...will I ever be able to raise a family here?
Other then the fact it seems like a total nightmare, it can't be cheap raising a little one in the big apple. 

Thousands of young girls right out of college move to New York to follow their dreams, have the time of their lives and to hopefully fall in love. But how dangerous can falling in love be for a girl new to a big ol city, with the potential of finding "the one" and ultimately raising a family? I see it constantly -- young mothers schlepping their kids around, the chaotic stress they exuberate and the look in their eyes, pleading to anyone they lock gazes with, screaming "help me", is like seeing into a looking glass of the future.

I fell in love with a born and raised manhattan boy. Whose parents were both born and raised, and both sets of their parents were born and raised. So, guess where my man wants to have his kids ? That's right, in Manhattan so they can be born and raised.

Although marriage and a family might be a few years away for me, after over two years in a happy relationship, a girl can't help but have thoughts. And as a girl who grew up living ten minutes from the beach, with a jungle in her backyard, I can't help but hope for something similar for my kids one day or at least a backyard and a white picket fence!

Alas, as I fall more in love with Mr. Manhattan, I can't help but bring up sweetly "You know, there are lovely places outside the city with only a 20 minute commute!"

But today, when I witnessed a man hurry past a woman with her two little kids, pushing all three of them into the street where a speeding taxi nearly just missed them, I thought, can I really do this? 

As a frantically pulled out my cell phone and started typing to my boyfriend "I'll take Brooklyn, Queens, hell even the Bronx!" I hit the backspace button, took a deep breath and kept walking.
They always say love will make you do crazy things you never deemed possible -- whoever "they" are.

LOVE STORY

With Valentine's Day around the corner and love being in the air this week, I figured why not write a post on love! I decided what better way to do it then give you a love story. So, this is a little piece that I'm working on in one of my workshops. Hope you enjoy! 

I turn around and there he is. Ebony slits cradled in the shape of a half moon, empty and hauntingly detached, so distinctly prominent from the rest of his face, which appears bright and cherry. I am able to capture the real shadows that lie in the pinkness of his check. Shadows that seem so familiar to mine, I can't hep but stare in dismay. He stands there, hands crammed into his blue jean pockets, shoulders touching his ears, talking animatedly with the pianist, not noticing my existence, not realizing we are both standing here breathing the same air.

When he introduces himself to the class, and inhales to exhale notes pure and crisp, I feel like my whole body has become paralyzed. The song is bland, a popular contemporary song for most baritones, but hearing him sing it is enchantingly beautiful. I wonder how just his voice is able to make me hear the melody for the first time, and it fascinates me how the lyrics have hit me right through the heart, pleading for the song never to end and for him to never stop singing it.

For a moment he catches my eye, and in that moment, I don't see the man who put a gun to his head last week, ready to pull the trigger or the pride stripped from him, because he realized he has little to no money in his bank account or even the painful loneliness which has washed over him, devouring him whole. I don't see any of this when I look at him, because I don't know him to be this man yet. All I know in the quick exchange of a glance is I want to love this man with every being in my body.

Hope you have a Happy Valentine's Day :) 

EPIC LOVE

The bible, or as the rest of the world calls it, Cosmo, recently wrote an article on 'epic love'. Being the love junkie that I am,  I was so intrigued by the article that it inspired me to write my own take on it.

Epic love. Heart stopping, gut-wrenching, all consuming epic love is so hard to find, and once you find it, who's to say you will ever have an intense attraction to someone like that again in your lifetime? To people who have experienced it before, no one can ever make you feel the way that person did. It's an indescribable feeling of passion, the attraction is undeniable, and the sex is usually earth shattering, taking you places you've never been before.

When you hear that persons name you go weak in the knees, and you find yourself doing anything just to get the opportunity to wrap your arms around them or at the least see them. The relationship is so powerful and untouchable at times, that it often ends up shattering into a million pieces, that no matter how hard you try, the pieces will never fit back together perfectly. As stated in Cosmopolitan Magazine, when both parties are perfectly matched, neither partner gives in easily- so when epic lovers butt heads, it can lead to epic destructive arguments.

Sarah*, a close friend of mine, had an epic love that she hasn't been able to overcome for over 7 years. She now finds herself in a serious relationship with a man whom she believes is the one, yet the epic love she once had with her ex Jeff* still lingers in her life, and heart-wrenchingly, in her bed. "I will always love Jeff, but we can never be together again for a number of reasons that you probably don't want to hear about," Sarah confides to me. "He's one of my best friends, but we can't even be in the same room together without wanting to rip off each other's clothing. And now that I'm in a relationship with an incredible guy I truly care for, I feel like a monster, because Jeff has somehow snaked his way back into my life. As much as I don't want him around anymore, I can't say no. I just can't say no to him." 

So, can one truly be blamed for cheating if it's with an epic love? I believe that epic love is something that at times can't be stopped. Sarah has physically cut of all communication with Jeff, in order to save her current relationship. "He'll text me and I won't respond. Then a few weeks later he'll send me some sentimental bs, and even though I know he's full of it, I sometimes can't help but write back. It's like I can't think straight around him!"

Sarah claims that she hasn't spoken to Jeff in months, but how long can she remain strong? Cheating is an awful act to commit, and you might question how anyone could cheat on someone they truly love?
 But if someone, like Sarah, is cheating with an ex, it becomes more excusable in their mind. They don't see it as being awful because not only have they slept with the person before, they slept with them before they even met their current partner. Technically this does not make their actions excusable, but if the cheater realizes what they are doing is wrong and take steps to stop anything from progressing, I believe that it's possible to let one error of judgment go. 

My epic love story is kind of like a modern day Romeo and Juliet, minus anyone dying. Bill* and I come from two different worlds completely, so much so that we could never pursue any type of future together. However, by the time we realized this, it was too late. We were hooked, and have found a way to remain in each other's lives on and off for years. When we were together the connection was electric.

He knows how to pleasure me in ways that I'm afraid no man will ever be able to again. Both of us share the sign of scorpio and our relationship was spicy, intense, and dramatic. When I am with Bill he makes me feel like I'm the most beautiful woman on earth. He understands not only my body perfectly, but my mind. If I was in a bad mood, all he had to do was open his mouth, start talking, and it was like I had just turned on an episode of SNL. Half the time I had no idea what he was saying, but once he got me to start smiling, I couldn't stop.

Yes, Bill was everything I needed physically and at times, emotionally, but mentally and realistically, in every way wrong for me.

The truth is, being with Bill was so painful at times that the agony was too immense to handle. I think that was because our relationship was so extreme in some aspects, that it was too difficult to get the rest of the relationship to match up. And so he got scared, and I got scared. And after much convincing from my family and friends that he was nothing but trouble for me, I finally had to be true to myself and admit that they were absolutely right. I am at my best when I'm not with Bill, and I am afraid that our epic love was so epic that we forgot to state the obvious.

After recently meeting with Bill to catch up, I let the big fat elephant in the room finally come to attention. I admitted how much I really had loved him and how painful it was that in the course of our relationship we'd never said the words to each other. Hearing him say the words I had known all along, that he did love me and always will, was the closure I needed to finally put my love with him to an end.

Epic love is scary, exciting, everlasting, and impossible at the same time.

When I look at girls who have felt like Sarah and I, and who desperately need to close that chapter in their lives, it makes me wonder if what we're feeling is still as fierce as we believe it to be. When you associate one feeling with a person for so long it tends to stick with them so that you can't associate any other feeling with them. And, because you are used to feeling that one emotion for them, it's hard to realize when it's gone and when nothing is left but a distant warn out memory of times gone by.

I will always keep my epic love in a place in my heat, but instead of living in the past, I'm more excited for the future with someone who I know can complete and balance me perfectly.

*Names have been changed