Flight Mode
I live in flight mode. It’s all I’ve ever known. It’s what I’ve lived and breathed since as long as I’ve had a memory. As a child I pretended to be an orphan running away in the woods. I didn’t even want parents. I just wanted to go in the opposite direction of everybody else for as long as I can remember. It wasn’t that I couldn’t make friends. I did. Easily. So easily it made me uncomfortable at times...like it was too much for my mood to handle.
Everybody wants love. It seems so obvious and it came so comfortably for everybody else. But love sends you away is what I learned - to something better and more deserving...something with more money and more stuff. Love meant cutting you off at the roots and turning you into something else...turning you into an object. Over and over again...love was cold and forced...never earned. The boarding school I was sent to believed we had to break in order to be built back up. So I learned to beat them all to the punch. I learned to leave.
I remember in high school the second boyfriend I had...we were infatuated with each other. He is still one of the most respectable boys I’ve ever dated. He didn’t want to go too fast, but he was cool - those things didn’t go together back then. And several girls liked him. Yet, somehow he chose me. But it all ended abruptly the night he told me he loved me. He was so nervous telling me but also excited. His hand went straight through his hair as if to calm himself down, his blue eyes never came off me, and his dimples turned my heart into fire. It was the way love was supposed to feel - fun and wonderful and fearless...like the heart had never been broken before. We were outside the movie theater and some girl just told us how cute a couple we were. We were in love...or on the edge of falling. But then I got a peek into what love would feel like for the rest of my life. We were holding hands and laughing and he said, “I think I’m falling in love with you.” And it’s like a gun shot went off in my ear and all I could do was run.
I dumped him immediately...or maybe I ghosted him. I don’t remember. I just wanted it all to go away as if none of it had ever happened. I remember seeing him in the halls the next day, and in class, his face that was once uplifted was now sinking...and I felt his eyes on me trying to get me to look at him. I couldn’t look.
It took years of similar situations to realize it was becoming a pattern...always a little different...but eventually getting more and more complicated. The men got more complicated, too. And if they weren’t complex on their own, then the gunshot would only get louder the closer we got to each other. And the more I needed to run or sabotage it, the greater the guilt - the greater the burden of love - but it was either their heart get crushed or my world get turned upside down.
Love is excruciatingly difficult for me. It’s not pleasant like it is for most. Love for me is not in the heart, but in the amygdala. It used to feel wonderful at first, before the commitment, but always became unbearably suffocating. And now it’s all just suffocating. It’s not that I’m scared of having my heart broken, I’m scared of my heart being tricked, stolen from me, and turned into something I’m not. But now I’m most scared of doing to others what’s been done to me. Yet at the same time, love is the one thing that could undo all this trauma. If only it didn’t feel like it was trying to kill me at the same time. If only the gunshot didn’t go off. But then, maybe I would never have learned to fly.
Video here: Flight Mode
