May | 2010 | Loved from the Start

For a while it had been a friendship I had cherished, a one-sided love that I grasped and pulled at in attempts to mold it into something ideal. After a while it became something different, something harmful. Something illusory. I wanted it to be something it wasn’t and never could be. It became a kind of fragile security that could break at any moment… and so, desperate, I held on to it. But the more I tried to hold it, the more it tried to escape, and the more I didn’t want to let go.

And I was devastated with this knowledge that I wasn’t prepared to face.

For a while I wasn’t ready to let go and face that what I was holding on to no longer was something I should let go of. It might have been pretty before, but come on, this false love wasn’t pretty anymore, and it was not mine. And had never been.

(I was a pretty messed up kid.)

Friends knew about my struggle. Well-meaning, they told me to try my hardest to let go. So I did. I mean, I tried. But I didn’t want to. I wasn’t ready to let go. Part of me knew that I was making myself miserable by dwelling on this lost love; however, another part of me thought that I could be happy if I had this lost love.

It was only after I started college, met new people and became occupied with a new sort of life that I forgot about it. A few months later, I would realize that I had let go without even realizing it. It was then that I finally saw it for what it was: something tiny that had been made into something bigger than it was by my fevered imagination.

I’m amazed now that I could have been so stupid. I am so thankful that things happened the way they happened, even though I was angry at the time… because who knows how long it would have taken me to realize?

It happens differently for different people. Maybe if I had been a stronger person, maybe if I had tried harder and tried not to lean on myself so much, I would have been able to let go much earlier and been a much happier person without several damaged relationships to give me nightmares. I think I am most thankful that even though I was (am) such a weak person, God provided a way out for me all the same.

Even without my realizing it.

Isn’t it interesting how we can only see clearly when the situation has passed? And how we’re somehow loathe to look at it from different perspectives at that time and place because we’re not ready yet?

It passes when it passes, and perhaps when things have happened to let us open our eyes to see things with clarity for the first time.

I have this unholy love of potatoes. UNHOLY, I tell you. I adore tater tots and hashbrowns, never mind how greasy the dining hall makes them, though I simply cannot stand the greyish substance that passes for breakfast potatoes on bad days. I absolutely love potato salad. And french fries. I think I eat potatoes every single meal. I love potato soup. And potato in everything. I also love potato chips. BBQ and sour cream are my favorites. I’m starting to have a taste for vinegar as well.

I don’t even know why I like potatoes so much. I just do. Even when I was a kid, my favorite kind of bread was potato bread. With garlic.

Someone should probably get me a cookbook with “100 ways to cook a potato” which includes various unhealthy means of putting a plain ordinary potato in some fancy, tasty form. That would also work as an incentive for me to learn how to cook, too.

So I realized when the music department was having an end of the year party and I got excited when I heard there would be potato salad.

Cue pictures of potatoey stuff, courtesy of Flickr.

I have no idea what this is, but it sure looks good.