Heart Kicking

A friend recently posted on Facebook that he just got his heart kicked again.   A reminder that heart break happens to us all.   One of the great levelers of the playing field for all is love with its peaks and inevitably its valleys.   This friend of mine is amazingly handsome, eyes so deep that you drown every time he even says hello.   Beyond all the physical attributes is a heart as big as all get out.   Generous with hugs and smiles he lights up the darkest corner in any space.   So it is always so hard for me to imagine anyone could hurt this beautiful creature; but like I say, Love makes victims out of all of us at one time or another.

Ironically Judy Garlands drops on my playlist singing Almost like Being in Love and I wonder when a hopeless romantic like me fell out of love with being in love?   I still discover the remains of the romantic in me from time to time; but unfortunately I discover them when I’ve allowed myself to start to have expectations and hope about how things are going in my own relationship and then the inevitable shoe drops and I become aware of the reality and boundary of this kind of romantic dreaming and scheming.

I understand now why all of my friends who were in long term relationships and marriages always told me that it takes “work.”  I guess those of us who are the hopeless romantics think things should be sort of a magic carpet ride at least 50% of the time.   I foolishly thought that all this heart break and being kicked in the heart kind of stuff would be a part of my history when I dated all those losers and found the Prince.   All of a sudden I would have rewritten happy endings to Funny Girl and The Way We Were with my shiny new mind blowing relationship.

The truth is it is pretty mind blowing.   Mind blowing that at the end of the day, when all is said and done and I’ve stepped out of my fairy tale bubble bath that it does, after all, take work.   The other mind blowing thing is that you are in this relationship and you still get your heart kicked around.    Wasn’t all that bullshit supposed to end the minute you cross over that dating stage into the “together forever,” stage?   Reality Check my darlings, at least for me, you can get your heart kicked even by the alleged "Mr. Right."    Friends I’ve known that have been together for twenty years gives me even more startling facts that indeed even after that amount of time they still get their hearts trampled on from time to time.   WTF?

Sometimes I worry that I must be building up all these walls because I notice things that used to ruffle me barely even register in my heart and tear ducts anymore.   But then something will come along and I find myself feeling kicked in the heart and I guess it is at that point that I can take heart that if I’m feeling it that strongly then I must not be heartless after all.

I am slowly learning that not everything has to live up to my fantasy and somehow balance that with still trying to maintain some sort of romantic hopefulness.  The great thing about love is that it comes in many forms and just like a generator when the storms of life have cut off the main power we can rely on the love of friends and family to back us up.  No matter how many times my heart has got the shit kicked out of it and seemingly shattered into unfix-able pieces it was love in some form that held the glue.  

 To my friend who is feeling a fresh round of heart kicking I guess this wasn’t necessarily a very uplifting comforting piece; but he can take heart that he isn’t alone and that the benefit of having so many friends is that he has that much love he can lean on and count on.  This ole Southern Fried Diva sure is sending him much love.   Hugs baby doll!