Never the Same Love Twice

So yeah, I totally did look at my brother’s girlfriend’s blog after she linked it on Facebook. Can you blame me?

And… it’s adorable. For one thing, the girl is witty and contemplative. But on a more meaningful note, whenever she references or talks about my brother, you can *hear* the love she has for him. It radiates from every word she says about him.

I am just in awe. So grateful and pleased that my brother has found someone so early in his life that wholeheartedly loves him just the way he is.

Maybe I’m a little jealous.

But then it got me thinking.

My brother is blessed, but I have been too.

At my brother’s age, I found someone who changed my life irrevocably. Someone, albeit someone was not the right person for me, who showed me what it meant to look into another person’s soul and love every little bit of him. Despite the problems with him and with us, that love was powerful enough to overwhelm it all.

Then I went to college and loved a good man. Again, not the right one for me. But I spent two years with someone who made me laugh, let me cry on his shoulder, and tried to help me in any way he could. And he showed me what a good relationship has the potential to be: a partnership of two individuals who love each other. Two people who respect and admire each other, and are willing to lay aside their differences for the pleasure of being together.

And then in this last year alone… how my love has dazzled me. Sometimes you meet someone and everything just clicks. And you don’t have to hide any part of yourself because you know this person will listen, never judging. And maybe that person will love you all the more for it, for revealing the deepest, darkest parts of you.

I was lucky enough to fall in love with my best friend, and miracle of miracles, she loved me back. For whatever god-knows-what reason, she manages to see me for who I truly am… and loves me.

Loves me enough to pick up the phone when I call her in the middle of the night, to muddle her way through shitty internet connections so we can have a conversation, to send me poetry or pictures that remind her of me, to attempt to continue the bond between us even though we’re miles apart.

And maybe that’s amazing.

To answer your question, no, I don’t know where this is headed. For that matter, I don’t know where *I’m* headed. That’s not the point.

So what if I have no idea what my future holds. Who the fuck cares if I’m single. I have been, and continue to be blessed by the love in my life.

My love life bears no similarities to my brother’s. And once I saw past the petty jealousy of that fact, once I saw what is really there, it’s so easy to be grateful for this life of mine and the love it contained, contains, and will contain.

“There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald