I am a little afraid of Love.

If I write it at the title to this blogpost then maybe it will largely go unnoticed. Like an aside, like a whisper, like an afterthought. If I write it like that, then I will not have to admit that I have made this statement based on evidence supplied by the entire canvas of my existence to date. I am as scared of Love as I am of the gap on The Tube. I am as nervous of surrendering to the feeling as Priest is about navigating a Lingerie department. Of course, "Love" does not simply mean the Romantic type, I'm not exclusively talking about the "Knock the air from your lungs, walk about in a daze" kind of feeling, commonly confused with Lust. I am, like perhaps a lot of people, scared to love because of the threat of loss.

When we give ourselves over to Love, we also embrace its sickly and malevolent bedfellow, Loss. This is a notion not lost on me, as someone who lost her (house) Cat for about 5 hours yesterday and experienced the full gamut of human emotion over a tiny Burmese-tabby cross. I love my Cat as much as a human can form an attachment to any kind of inanimate object, or pet. I convince myself her demands for food are affection and thus translate them into my amorously-deficient brain as "Love". When I want to, I convince myself my Cat Loves Me. She actually just loves the food and access to a warm duvet. In writing this last, I am forcibly reminded of more than one ex-boyfriend, only less cute and minus arse licking.

It is funny, the lies we tell ourselves just to feel "it". When we entertain Love, we also entertain Loss. Because there is always a possibility that those and the things we love will leave us. Having lost several things I love, or thought I loved in my life, I was left, as most of us are in such circumstances, bewildered, quiet, shell shocked. The pieces in my head, and in my heart took a long while to fit back together and even now, I am not sure they were repaired properly. The heart does not come with a warranty and love, at least for me, is a bit like taking out an iPhone contract without insurance. You are always a little bit afraid to let someone use it because there is a chance that person may drop it and smash it. We invest a lot of ourselves in Love, in loving a husband or a wife, the implication is that we become a "half"- whilst it is easy to consolidate all that we are with another person when we love that person, it is excruciatingly difficult and almost impossible to flesh out what we so willingly sacrificed to that person, in the event that person betrays or leaves us. It is like growing another limb, as we writhe in the inflicted pain, we vow not to do this again, not to make these mistakes. We wander in a featureless landscape, numb and reeling with the enormity of the task, unable to see potential in anything and trying, trying so very hard, to get our heads around the fact that Love did this.

Who in their right mind would ever do it again?

I might be afraid to love and you might be thinking that my issue is with getting hurt, but about two years ago it dawned on me that I was also afraid to love the people I have lost. Not talking about the dead, choosing instead to keep them locked inside your heart is a natural thing. Some memories are too precious to go diluting them in their retelling, after all. For this reason, I do not wear a heart on my sleeve, but an Angels Wing, in the hope that somebody will ask me what it means and that proudly, I will be able to tell them about the people I am proud to have loved.

I talk about "It", Love, the BIG L, like a person who has never experienced it. But I have, at least I am pretty sure I have. Over the years I have flirted with Love in all of its intoxicating and tempestuous forms; First, Unrequited, Platonic, Cat. I have had it taken from me, I have lost it and I have bestowed it far too willingly. I have had it sneak up on me, grow like a cancer and finally die like a mangy fox. I have held my breath in limbo, terrified and anxious to feel and thrown my expectations at the feet of people who are entirely unable to pick them up and make sense of them. I am a fully paid up member to the love club. I  just don't attend meetings all that often. And other members don't seem to notice me.
-Incidentally, if there were (and as I type this I fervently hope that such a thing does not exist) such a thing as the love club, how VILE would it be? I imagine it manned entirely by cherubs with lots of red velveteen and swags everywhere...

Yes, like a Slimmer who's fondness for biscuits stops them attending a regular weigh in, I am similarly reluctant to perch my derriere upon a (plush, red, velvet) banquette in "the Love Club" I guess I used to wonder why this was, I used to think that a relationship was what I really wanted in life, but with age, we learn that the club rules of "the Love Club" are ultimately too complex and demanding and, like posh London nightspots achieve nothing more than make me look about, wondering what all the fuss was about. The best we can do is be patient, smile, laugh and trust that obstacles will clear away so that Love- the one that is right for us and is of our own design, will find us at last.