Real Love, Part 2

"You think she's the one, Don?"

"You mean the one? The one and only?"

"Yeah, " he confirms.

"No."

"I guess that's why you broke up with her."

"Yeah. I guess." The sweat on my legs and arms is beginning to chill. I'm wishing for a jacket or a sweatshirt. "You know, Paul, " I start, "I think she was going to break up with me anyway."

"What makes you say that?"

"Little things. She would say little things. Do little things. I don't think she was really into it."

"How long did you two date?"

"Not long."

"How long?"

"About six months or so."

"That's pretty long. Some folks figure it all out in that amount of time."

"I really liked her, you know. She just wasn't in it. I think I dropped the bomb first. But she was about to do it anyway."

That last sentence is said with tenderness. As if to release some small ache. Paul's expression gives sympathy. But he doesn't know it is more the pain in my legs than the pain in my chest that is causing this melancholy. Kristin is Kristin. A beautiful girl. I miss her, I guess. But she and I were never meant to be. She was in between boyfriends and too pretty to go without. I was there like a number in a bakery. She pulled the ticket, glanced at it, and waited to exchange me for some loaf of bread or cake or pie or feeling that she was beautiful. But I gave her the slip. Came right out of her hands before she could claim the prize and I bet you, I bet you a million dollars, she doesn't even remember that number. She'll just pull another ticket, glance at it, and wait for them to call out her number. She won't remember the things I said and won't realize I had never said them to another girl. She'd heard them all before and it all ran together like bad poetry. You could see it in her eyes when I talked to her. You could hear it in the way she said thank you when I complimented her dress or the color of her eyes.

It's funny how you think you need something but you really don't. I mean I remember feeling like if I didn't have this girl I was going to die. But I am not dead, and I feel fine, and I think half the time when I like some girl I am really looking for some kind of redemption, some kind of feeling that I matter or am valuable or am needed, and I don't think there is a problem with that, but if just makes you realize how much we use each other sometimes.

I heard once that real love doesn't ask what is in it for me; it just gives unconditionally. It just tries to take the weight out of somebody else's pack, lessen [the] load, and if it gets reciprocated, that's great, but that isn't what you did it for. It makes me wonder if real love, not the crap we trade on the street, but real love, longtime ... love, is another metaphor. I mean, I was thinking about it the other day and I couldn't think of a purpose for love in terms of Darwinian mechanisms. It seems like there is a reason for sex, for lust and all of that, but what about love? How does love, like beauty and light, help the Darwinian process? And I wondered if love itself, the real thing ... wasn't another metaphor for God.


----- excerpt from Through Painted Deserts by Donald Miller