When A Man Falls In Love After His Heart Has Been Broken

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Every time you catch me looking at you in a daze, all quiet without a single utterance, a look of intrigue surfaces across your soft features. Once, I stood at distance looking at you admiring the art display before you. The striking silence in the gallery was not disturbed by the joyful murmurs of my heart. You grinned and hopped over with the spring in your step that I’ve come to adore. You don’t know why I do that – these entirely random pauses where time stands still; when I simply look at you and stay silent. I know.

I remain amazed at this – us – every single time. Who are you? My mind and heart lie in awe. As a man in my twenties, embroiled by the battles of law school, falling in love again after the end of a long relationship was something I hadn’t realized I could still do. But there’s a light in you, and it feels like home. Those bright eyes of yours, full of both iron and silk, give me strength and hope.

Do you know what it feels like to have your soul and heart ripped into shreds – pieces thrown into an abyss so dark you can’t feel anymore? Do you know what it feels like to be indifferent to emotion, where you cherish every little bit of laughter, because the ability to laugh is now a gift come true? Do you know what it feels to fight, to have believed that you could fight the good fight and win, to find out that everything was worth nothing in the end? I did. Years of my youth of yore, years through military service and college, were spent in a relationship that bore no fruit. I was broken to the scraps.

Study abroad in Barcelona healed me in ways that I hadn’t known. But I didn’t feel ready for anything serious with anyone. I didn’t know I had it in me to open myself up again, because I know what a relationship is. It means serious work; it means commitment hoping that it would never end one day. A different inertia applies to men, I suppose, because in the culture we live in courtship remains something to be started by men. It wasn’t easy to take the first step to ask you out. I was afraid to open up beyond the level of irreverence I’ve become to be associated with. That would mean me putting my battered heart on the line, hoping that, perhaps, you would cast a little magic. Magic that would make my steps thrill with a spring again. I’ve gone far too weary. I didn’t try anymore.

But you dared me to try. You gave me the courage to go for it once again – to court relentlessly, armed with nothing but passion and sincerity, hoping that the vulnerability that I’ve put on wouldn’t leave me bleeding.

You smell like home. You made me alive again. You dared me to try. You are special, my dearest. You made me commit. And I’d be damned if I didn’t take every moment to look at this light in your eyes. I’m lucky I found you.

I have fallen in love again.

That is why I look at you.