Love and Passion

I’ve had some sleepless nights lately. My mind is full of doubts and questions and worries. It’s been giving me nightmares that have me actually crying out in my sleep. Storm has had to soothe me back to sleep when I’ve woke her up. That puts her in a great mood. So last night there weren’t any nightmares, but then I’d have had to actually gone to sleep for that. I dozed off for a bit here and there, but didn’t get any real deep sleep going. I actually ended up out in the living room because once I finally did get to sleep I must have snored or something because Storm woke me up with a sharp ‘shh!’ which pissed me off so I got up. We seem to sleep better in seperate rooms.

So I sat out here with a blanket and a cat and stared into the dark and my mind whirred a mile a minute. There’s a lot going on right now with us. Things that should make me very happy, but I’m not. I’m confused and scared and sometimes even pissed off. I need advice but there’s no one I can talk to who can give me an unbiased opinion. I told Storm that I think we need counseling of some sort. We need a third party to tell our sides to, someone who isn’t predisposed toward one or the other of us. Or worse, tells each of us what we want to hear even if it means they are playing both sides.  We don’t have anyone like that and we can’t afford actual couples therapy so we’re pretty much out of luck.  I dont’ know if that would make any difference anyway. Storm has a degree in that kind of thing and I don’t think she’d do very well on the receiving end of it. You now how they say doctors make the worst patients? Yeah, that kind of thing. She’s very good at analyzing other people and pinpointing ways to help them, but like most people, she can’t see her own situation and see what needs to be done. I’m the same way. It’s easier to look at someone else and tell them what they need to do to fix something. I think it’s because our own emotions aren’t involved in their drama.

One of the things I was thinking about is sort of philosophical and it’s something I can share. It’s also the basis of our problems. As far as I’m concerned anyway. I was thinking about love and passion. It’s possible to have one without the other, apart from family relationships. I love my friends, some more than others honestly. But I don’t feel any passion toward them. In the same vein I have felt passion for someone, lust really, and not had any of the softer loving emotions toward them apart from basic friendliness. But I don’t feel that a monogamous, committed relationship can be without both of these things. They need each other to survive.

In the beginning a relationship has them both. There’s love and there’s passion and these fuel each other. But what happens over time as the passion fizzles out. I know, I’ve been told that’s the natural progression of things. Supposedly the love is supposed to make up for the lack of passion as the years go by. I don’t see how. Sure, if a couple are happy with the love they have changing into more of a deep friendship than a love affair then that’s great for them. If they don’t mind that there is no sizzle left, no fire or chemistry between them anymore then they can still be happy together. But what if that comfortable kind of love isn’t enough? What if only one of them feels that way?

I feel that way. I want a realtionship that keeps that fire alive. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life living with someone I love just a step above a friend. I need more than that. I deserve more than that. I deserve passion and I deserve to feel as if I am wanted on a sheer physical level. Some may say that my need to feel wanted, even lusted after, stems from a lack of self esteem. That I need that outside input because I don’t like myself and that I can’t build good self esteem based on how other people treat me. Why not? It’s how other people treat me that tears my self esteem apart, why can’t it build it up as well? Besides, this isn’t about self esteem….it’s about sex. Raw, hot, wet sex and the lack thereof. For me, a relationship that lacks good sex or any sex for that matter cannot survive. It is vital and essential. Some people may be happy in a platonic relationship. I’m not one of them.

How can love survive without passion? I don’t think it can. I think it begins to wither and to morph into something else altogether. Sure it can become caring. It can become that kind of emotion where you can’t really imagine your life without that person, but you don’t feel that same charge, that flutter of excitement you used to feel at the mere thought of them. You would miss them if they were gone, but would your heart break? Would you lie awake at night and ache to have them beside you again? I don’t think so. I think you’d pick yourself up and get on with life and maybe that would include finding passion again.

This old house…

When I think of growing up, think of the place I call my hometown and the house I ‘grew up’ in, I think of the old house in Scio. My parents bought it when I had barely begun first grade. We lived there until mid-fifth grade when we had to move, but they kept the place. My oldest sister lived there the most, but all three of my siblings and their familes had a turn living there. In fact when my parents and I had to move back to Scio, just before I started high school, all three of them and their families were living in the old house. That’s how we refered to it, ‘the old house’ because it was old, and it seemed so big when I was growing up.

Somewhere there are pictures, mom surely has them, but I don’t need them. That house is burned into my mind. It was two stories, four really big bedrooms upstairs with a hall landing that could have made another small bedroom. Actually, for a while, when I was six or seven it was my bedroom after my oldest sister got married and she and her husband moved in with us while they tried to find a place of their own. Downstairs was a living room with another bedroom off of it, a dinning room that had actual doors to close it off, an enormous kitchen with very little cupboard space and the bathroom. There was an enclosed back porch area that we called the utility room because that’s where the washer and dryer went and off of that was the creepy old wood shed that was almost as big as the downstairs part of the house. It had a very creepy room with a door that was almost a foot thick and it was always cold in there. We called that the fruit room because when we moved in there were jars and jars of old fruit preserves left from the previous owners. There was an open porch that wrapped around one side and the front of the house and it was mirrored by what we called the ‘veranda’ on the upper floor. There was a grape arbor that grew along the side of the woodshed. It had gone wild long before we moved in and no one ever took the bother to tame it. The grapes were dark purple and never did taste very good. The house itself sat on a plot of land that was about two and a half acres, just flat pasture land that we never really did anything with. We had cows every now and then, but that was about it. In the front yard there was a huge evergreen tree, and out at the edge of the yard by the road were two twin trees of some kind. One of them was my tree and in high school I could often be found sitting under it with a notebook and pen, or a book. In the back, just behind the house, was an old mulberry tree. The berries weren’t good for anything but making a mess on cars parked under it and feeding birds, who then made messes on cars parked anywhere on the property.

When we moved back to Scio the summer before I started high school my parents and I lived in camp trailers parked out back. There wasn’t room in the old house for us yet. I think my second oldest sister moved out first. I think that was the only time she’d had to move in there and it was the last time. My brother went next leaving my older sister and her family living upstairs and my parents and I downstairs. For a while I had a bed in the living room right under the stairs next to the closet. I could have actually put a bed in the closet because it was just big enough. Very Harry Potter. I would have liked that, because then I would have had a door to close and a little privacy. My mom didn’t like the idea however. So she let me move my bed into the dinning room. Right in front of the giant picture window…creepy. But at least I had doors to close. Not that it gave me privacy really. Anyone needing the bathroom had to pass through the dinning room to get to it. After my freshman year I moved back into the old camp trailer that had been mine. Dad parked it right along side the house and ran a power cord to it. I didn’t want to be in that house any more than I had to. Which was another reason I could be found under that tree as soon as the ground was dry enough to sit on. That was the summer Dad bought an old single wide trailer with two bedrooms and moved it onto the other side of the property. He could do that because the property was split into two tax lots. So a lot of work was done that summer. A drain field was dug, and pipes were laid so we could tap into the well for water. Electricity was laid in from the road and we even had a new address. It wasn’t the nicest of trailers, kind of ratty really, but I had my own room again. That made it a palace to me. I still didn’t have as much privacy as I felt I needed, but I had my own space and a door to close. Which my mother would promptly open to see what I was up to. I’m not sure if she was suspicious or if she was just nosey…okay, probably a little of the first and a whole lot of the second hehe.

So that’s where I grew up. That old house that I dream about even now. I dream about it often, always different dreams, but the house is a common element and either living there or having to move back there is usually a common theme. I always wake up from dreams like that feeling kind of out of whack, just a little off. I really hated that house.

When my parents finally sold the place in Scio I had already gotten married and moved out. I had sworn that no matter how bad things got I would never drag my family back to that place to live. When they sold it, though, I wanted desperately to buy it. I wanted to own the old home place….so I could burn that house to the ground. I had it all planned. I was going to donate the burning to the local fire department for practice, on the condition that I got to light the first match. I wanted to personally be responsible for it burning.

The new owners put in a new mobile home where our trailer had sat. Then they began to tear the old house down bit by bit. Storm and I drove by there this past summer and I took a couple of pictures on my phone. The property looks so small now that I’m older, it looks so different. But my child’s eyes could still see the shadow of that house sitting there. They didn’t get rid of it.

It’s weird really. I have a lot of really good memories of living there in Scio. Some of my best stories are from living in that old house. All of my best ghost stories, stories of my biggest crush, my first kiss, hilarious things about the nieces and nephews, my high school years…everything centered around that place in Scio. But a lot of my worst nightmares happened in that house, and it wasn’t just me. Things happened in that house that children should never have to experience. I think in a way I wanted it to burn to purge the bad memories, to clear the taint from the place, for all of us who have nightmares of living in that old house.

Because it is still there, it haunts my dreams and still calls me to come home.