I Used to Lie a Lot

I was watching TV on a lazy Sunday afternoon recently when I heard a line in a typically cliche crime drama that impressed me for its incredible truth and uncharacteristic originality within an otherwise nearly laughable script. 

"The saddest lies are the ones we tell ourselves." 

I started thinking about the biggest lie I ever told myself.

He will love me again. 
Eventually he is going to remember all the reasons he used to love me. 
He just will.
He has to.

I would think about "Mission Win Him Back" in the loneliest hours of the night, particularly after I had one (or five) too many drinks. I tried in every flirtatious fashion to make him stumble and fall back into all the laughs and dreams and feelings that come with young love. I would put on the perfume he liked. I would wear his old t-shirts. I would offer him a piece of spearmint gum, a smell I just knew would trigger all those old feelings. 

But if they did he didn't show it. He was too far gone, so gone that he didn't even seem to remember those times with the same sweet nostalgia I did. He was cold and dismissive. His smelled like smoke and his shaggy blonde hair covered the blue eyes I fell in love with. This stranger in familiar clothes kept pushing me away as I was trying to pull him back in for reasons I didn't understand. 

For years I've wondered what kept me there, in that place of loneliness and desperation. Maybe it was love. Maybe it was youthful ignorance. But, more than likely, it was rooted in my naive assumption that love happens once. You marry your first (and only) love.

I've had outspoken feminist beliefs before I even knew what that word meant so to think that I actually believed that load of shit is pretty humorous. But I did. I may not have said it outright but I learned what I saw. Grandma and Grandpa. Uncle Larry and Auntie Pam. Auntie Karen and Uncle David. My cousin, Jeff, and his wife, Val. Mom and Dad. My sister, Paige, and her Geek Squad boyfriend, Clint (whom she did indeed marry). First and only loves living happily ever after.

I tried and tried, even risking my sanity and my dignity, to make my first love my only love. But I didn't get my happily ever after. 

I got better. 

I got years of experience with heartbreak, learning to pick myself up after crying so hard I couldn't breath. I got to embrace love as it came and accept it for what it was and what it wasn't as I saw it slip through my hands. I got to learn what I didn't want in a man - selfishness, indecisiveness, manipulation. I got to see how wrong he was when he told me that nobody would ever love me again. I got to kiss some major toads and watch as they didn't turn into princes. I got the truest love of all when I needed it most, which happened to be at the most unlikely of times, in the most unlikely of situations. I got flowers in my dorm room with a note asking to be his girlfriend. I got the chance to experience the kind of passion, forgiveness, and unconditional love that I used to dream of. I got to learn that commitment is a decision, a choice you make each and every day when you look over and see your adorable husband drooling on the pillow next to you. 

I still lie to myself. 

"Running out of clean underwear doesn't necessarily mean I have to do laundry today." 
"I'm sure those cookies were around 25 calories.. I mean they were pretty small." 
"Sunscreen schmunscreen. I don't burn like I used to." (Followed soon by blisters).

But there's a truth, strong as oak, that I can repeat in my head over and over again all day, every day. He loves me. As I am. With all he has. Forever and ever. 

And that's a truth worth repeating.