This morning, as I woke, my mind was going out for its usual morning walk. It wanders around for a while before it finally comes back in time to begin work or start the usual days proceedings. When you think of the action of wandering, you tend to think of moving forward aimlessly. But not today. Today, My mind decided to move in reverse back towards the past and linger there for a while. As I laid in bed, I was aware that each of us are born with an empty room within our soul and throughout life, we adorn it with the decor of our intimate and personal encounters. So, I laid there this morning studying the fueng shuy of my room. Not my bedroom, but the room in my soul where I hang pictures of the past and the furniture of old loves. Some things are still boxed up. Some things are laying in front of the door and its the first thing you see when you would enter the room of my soul. They are blatant and annoying and I might even sprain my ankle on it if I weren’t careful. As I looked back, I found myself very fortunate. The women in the past I have dated, I thought, were some of the most beautiful women I’ve ever met in my life. And I didn’t come across them from dog-like mating ritual of a man on the hunt out for prey. No, we fell together incidentally like pieces of a puzzle and fit together beautifully for a time. And we fell apart just as abruptly. As if the childlike universe decided it was done playing and threw the puzzle back into the box and tossed it back on the shelf. Suddenly, looking over my past loves, a single thought kicked open the door to my room and stood waiting there.

When I am in love, I am repulsive.

That repugnant idea echoed in my head. It stared at me from the doorway. It was morbid, depressing, hopeless, and most unsettling of all, it was true. Why, in the midst of all this contentment did this thought come burrowing its way into my minds-room like a mole? That phrase followed me to work and I tried to grasp not only its contents, but its source. That should make it dissipate. Ideally, your subconscience should be like the shadow of a monster on the wall at night. It emerges as eerie and terrifying, but once you shine a light on it you’ll see it is only the sillouette of some dirty laundry. This isn’t always the case. Sometimes you turn the light on, and there is still a monster there. A real one. The light I turned on it, showed me what wasn’t such a surprise to me. The intense fear of losing control. The desperate, futile efforts to maintain power over everything around me for fear of spinning out of control and dissolving into madness. The madness of the universe. The madness of God.

God and love. They are two heads of the same monster that still lurks even when I shine light on it. They are strange, unfamiliar, intangible and frightening. Why? Because these two “things” (I don’t even know what they are) are the intense epitome of loss of control. Let me be more specific: a shift in control. That’s what love is. Giving yourself up. Hopelessly. And announcing “this person can do with me as they wish for I have faith in them to always make the best decisions for my life. No matter what”. Doesn’t that sound like God to you? Maybe these two are no different? Maybe that is God? The God that showed itself to me growing up was always upside down. It was a mirror reflection of the madness and chaos and unpredictability of the world around me.

The moment I was thrown into the world, I was introduced to chaos. Internally and externally. Things were spinning out of control around me and my insides were crawling with anxiety. My mind mirrored the nonsensical world around me and soon it began to be just as unpredictable, nonsensical and frightening. Something inside me developed a peculiar behavior that came to act as me surfacing for a breath of air while drowning in a sea of madness. Control issues. When there is something I care deeply around I try to control it because the chaos around me ensures with enthusiasm that it will leave soon. Love and God are representative of a loss of control. My struggle for that same control becomes the opposite of these two things. In turn, I become ridden with a deep ugliness. My love is not love. It is repulsive and alienating. And God and Love and all other things that are warm and good will continue to truly elude me on and on until I finally lose complete control and spiral out into the maddening universe.