My own brain is on overdrive in many odd and unusual ways these days. Love can do that to a person, I suppose. Or so I've been told by the powerful and all-knowing Dr. Google.
The Love Competition from Brent Hoff on Vimeo.
I mentioned the other day, via Twitter, that I felt like the Scarecrow who was asking the Almighty Oz for a brain. It really isn't much different than that these days. I have good days and then really bad days where I refuse to emerge from beneath the covers and Stella stays close and the broken record of "loser" plays over and over and over and over while I scream into my pillows. I wish I could report that it was all sunshine and roses and perfectly calm and lovely, but the swirling mish mash that substitutes currently for a brain underneath the golden curly locks atop my head is nothing if not a massive category 5 hurricane most days and the evacuation routes are all blocked with broken down cars filled with desperate people who forgot to buy gasoline and are quite certain they are all going to die underneath the bridge they call home.
The beautiful part of all of this is that I'm madly in love. Or is that the practical joke? No, it's the beautiful part, I really did just say the beautiful part and I have to, no I am absolutely insisting on believing it is the beautiful part. The kind of love that causes you to trip over your own two feet and face plant in the snow because you forget that the ground is down and the sky is up, but that just leaves you in a fit of unstoppable giggles. This is the kind of love that causes you to grab your glue and your glitter and craft a genuine valentine card despite all protestations that you do not celebrate those holidays marked on the calendar to honor dead saints and force the death of healthy flowers and consumption of chocolate just to prove that you love someone.
This is the kind of love that hurts when you're not your best, when you're afraid to get out of bed, when your own voice is incapable of finding the words that you want, you need, to explain to this professor, this man who has chosen you, that you're broken and full of crazy mixed up hysteria that might not be exactly the naked love he was hoping to find.
My professor is full of the kind of love that keeps saying yes and is curious enough to keep asking all the right questions when it would be far easier for him to just close the door tightly, lock it with both locks, and walk quietly away.
I have extraordinarily hysterically bad brain chemistry. We both know this. He's not walking away or closing any doors or locking any locks. He keeps showing up and he keeps loving me. He knows that if he walks in tomorrow and my hair is electric pink and there's a manifesto written on the walls and I've made forty-seven kinds of vegan chocolate cupcakes to try for dinner, well, it's chocolate cupcakes for dinner and we might have to paint the walls. The surprising and unimaginable and most lovely thing for me is that instead of living my life in the terror of the usual reaction of anger and rage that usually erupts like hot volcanic lava, I realize that my professor will embrace my quirky eccentric manifestations and love me through them. Love.me.through.them.
This is where the healing begins and the hurt starts to end.
I know nothing is forever. That lesson I've learned in spades. I also know you can't love hard enough. You can only love what is and that's really all I've got.




