Rules of Love

Sciences. Physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics; logic and patterns; those were things that made perfect sense to me. There were always rules to follow to eliminate problems and secure results, even irregularities had a set of rules that made them irregular. There were always inductive laws that paved static sequences that led to rational, justified, firm conclusions.

Humans. Interactions, relationships, emotions; disorder and diversity; those were things that made absolutely no sense to me. There were never any rules, problems appeared where least expected, and the results were as varying as the people seeking them. Even when following the road more traveled, even when the mind stretched out safety nets before the heart could jump, even when there only ever was one straight line to follow with the destination clear in sight and definite, pebbles often turned out to be rocks and the conclusion was often inconclusive.

Once, when I was dealing with far too many feelings than I knew how to feel, my older sister suggested that I color my feelings. It was some kind of a therapy method she’d read about somewhere, whereby it was advised to assign a color for each emotion in order to better recognize and control them. Situations and the feelings they provoked started to make a little more sense to me when I synced them with colors and substantial sights that I could understand and rely on their durability.

Sadness, to me, was a dark, watery shade of blue. I compared its characteristics with the sea; dark, deep, raging, overflowing, inescapable.

I matched happiness with the sky; a bright, almost-glowing shade of blue, a little harder to attain but always above everything else and free of any boundaries.

I correlated love with the esoteric blue of distant mountains; some were big, some were small, some rewarded the climb with a beautiful view that attained the sky and became a part of it and some completely barren with the sea at their foot.

But, the thing about mountains, they are always there. Whether they are too far ahead to doubt ever reaching or too far behind to become unsettled dots, they are still there, keeping the ground of life from slipping into chaos.

I grew up with my mountain. I watched it form into everything I could ever want or need. I thought that I knew it from base to top, and, oh, how I wanted to reach the top. I thought that I knew every patch of soft grass and every stubborn stone, but I was wrong.

It lured me up, and I climbed with my eyes closed, too confident in having memorized every step of the way while gaping from the bottom. But the higher I climbed, the thicker the trees became, shutting me out. I couldn’t make it to the top, it wouldn’t let me, and I was too high up to remain standing against the storm that blew. I fell; it dropped me. I broke; it broke me.

I told myself that there were other mountains to climb – maybe not as beautiful and high, or maybe even more beautiful and higher. Of course, there had to be other mountains; my world was not stabilized with just one.

So, I turned my back on the mountain that had once consumed me and I made to search for another that suited me; one that I could climb easily, one that didn’t have too many shadows, one that was ordinary and small, because the more extraordinary it was and bigger the more turns and twists there were to its top and those demanded everything. I couldn’t give everything. I had given everything once before and I never got all of it back to give again.

I thought that I had moved on, that I was so far away from my mountain that I could convince myself that it had never even existed, that I had gone far enough for another mountain to be standing just a few more steps away, but I was chasing mirages.

Maybe my legs had gotten broken from the fall and I never managed to stand again and remained in place expecting other mountains to simply slide closer to me or to sprout out from underneath me so that I could innately be at the top, or maybe I had never fallen out as far as I had thought and remained all that time at the skirts of my mountain, going in circles around the bottom, because, years later, when I was forced to look back, I found out that I had never managed a single step away from it or, or maybe it had never let me out of its trees.

This is a published book. I'll be posting some of my favorite parts from it on here, but if you wish to support me (a new author - hopefully you'll be a published one soon, too), you can get a copy of the book at a discount now following any of the links below!

Amazon: (available as EBook and PaperBack)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09SDMM8JY?ref_=pe_3052080_276849420

Apple: https://books.apple.com/us/book/id1610018931

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