He was the man who broke my heart with "I love you but I can't be in love right now."
And then he fled to the mountains in Alaska to heed the call of the wild and also hide from the overwhelming love overflowing from my heart.
When I love I love HARD.
It generally scares the shit out of the poor bastard.
So when we saw each other this year for the first time in five years and had an incredibly loving interaction it was one of the most precious nights of my life.
(And then as Fate would have it, as an even further delight, later that same night The Phantom of the Opera played the song he wrote me on his guitar.....but that's a whole other story....)
Mr. Volcano travels a lot.
He's a bit of a wandering soul, living in one place for a few months, another for a few more.
Right now he's about to embark on a walkabout for several months backpacking through some forest of solace.
And the girl he's dating is totally cool with that, which I think is inspiring.
I want to be the kind of woman whose understanding and supportive enough to give the man I love what he needs, however unconventional.
(But no back door. Sorry, gentlemen. I'm a classy fucking broad. There are boundaries.)
But I thought how rare and wonderful a match they must have.
I don't think there are very many women who'd be okay with their love leaving for a long adventure that they couldn't be a part of.
(I'd be like, can't I come visit so we can do it in a tree??)
I couldn't believe that after all this time Mr. Volcano and I were penpals.
We both loved to write.
It was kind of adorable that he liked it so much because he was truly an introvert, a man of few words, but when it came to writing, he had so much to say.
He actually broke up with me in an email.
Of course, I didn't appreciate his love of writing then.
I got it as I was walking into work at Victoria's Secret.
(Vicki's Hush Hush?? God! That was a lifetime ago! I may or may not have freaked out, crying so violently that they sent me home.
It's hard to suggestively sell the miraculous bra when you're busy being a drama queen.)
I remember calling him and yelling through the phone, "YOU BROKE UP WITH ME IN AN EMAIL?!?!"
He, in his small town ignorance, thought I'd read the email on my computer once I got home after we'd met and talked face to face when I got off work.
In his defense he still had a flip phone, the kind so crappy the only photos it took were blurry and in sepia.
I couldn't believe it.
Of course like most of the men who'd broken up with me things didn't really end there.
Something about me makes the men who love me too overwhelmed to be with me but too captivated to let me go.
They think they need to linger around and take care of me.
It would be endearing if it wasn't a consolation prize for the fact they're too scared to love me.
I'm the scariest fucking woman in Portlandia.
Lock your doors, men.
But now--right now, five long years later, Mr. Volcano was offering me relationship advice.
"I think romantic relationships tend to get complicated because not a lot of us learn to develop emotional intelligence at a young age (or as adults.)"
To hear him talk like that when he'd been such an overwhelmed, frightened, confused, uncertain kid back when we dated gave me hope.
People change.
Whoever said people don't change never had any artists in their life.
The people I feel most connected to are always passionate about something, they're constantly growing and adapting, becoming different versions of themselves.
They CHANGE.
I know I certainly have.
Most recently I've changed the way I view love.
When I was younger I thought the most loving thing to do was to wait for love, to believe in it to the point of sacrificing myself at the altar of hope in it.
But now--
I believe in being direct, transparent, genuine in communicating love in all its raw, vulnerable truth.
And then if that love, as pure as it is, isn't received and reciprocated in similar sincerity, I move forward alone.
The kind of love I crave is too powerful to need the man possessing it to catch up to me.
It will consume and HAVE to be.
Because the kind of love that can live without mine, isn't the love I want.
Not for a second.
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