Our first love arrives like a caped superhero exploding through a glass ceiling, landing with a boom in the pit of our stomach. This masked mystery embodies all the clichés we have come to accept – it lets us fly, gives us Herculean strength and a shield of invulnerability.
Like a geek in a Batman movie, we are all nervous excitement and idiotic grin.
But then the hero becomes the villain and we are left broken and bruised; a bloodied heap on the floor, mere moments away from death. You feel as though you were tricked, deceived and fooled – and how it sucks to be a sucker.
The pain of that first lost love is so pure we truly believe we will never get over it. We believe the rest of our lives will be spent in a dark room with the curtains closed – maybe a sad Cure version of the Superman theme playing in the background.
LOVE’S SCAB
Some of us throw our hearts on the highway a few more times. We hope the trucks and taxis will miss it, but more often than not it ends up burst and in the dirty gutter – maybe a tyre track, tin can or tossed away fag-end making it almost unrecognisable.
It looks up at us and whimpers for help, but we pretend we can’t see it and carry on walking.
We are conditioned to give a little less of ourselves the next time around. We clothe ourselves in a suit of armour. We wear that armour for so long a scab grows between it and our soul.
We allow that scab to set, and the shell becomes a second skin that we believe to be our true appearance.
THE LUCKY DENT
Then a stranger rides into town.
This person promptly kicks down the saloon doors and starts shooting the place up. Tables are upheaved, glasses smashed, and even the piano guy runs for cover.
But you just stand there in your shiny pants and metal vest. This armour has lasted so long you’ve gone from medieval England to the Wild West in it – odd that no one noticed.
But then you flinch when a bullet doesn’t ricochet. Oh yes, it gets through and punctures a piece of wobbly flesh and you’re momentarily stunned.
If you’re a coward you’ll run, find a blacksmith and fix that suit up. And never again cross paths with the wily stranger popping off armour-piercing rounds into your jaundiced belly.
But if you have an ounce of courage you’ll stand tall and let the bullets shoot through you. You’ll grow a pair of metaphorical cobblers and let the best thing that could ever happen, happen.
PLANKING IS FOR PUSSIES
Extreme sports are for people not brave enough to love.
Sounds cheesy, I know, but the most dangerous thing you’ll ever do is to love someone openly and let the chips fall where they may.
“The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open,” Chuck Palahniuk writes in the sex addiction novel, ‘Choke’, and the happiest person in the world would at some stage need to have been the most miserable.
All that separates us from the other animals is our ability to fight against our instincts. We need to harden our resolve and pick up that hot coal again and again. We need to step over the pain and risk even more.
Those with courage will learn from past disaster, not merely react to it. They will let themselves again and again be swept away, run over, and shot through the heart – and one day they will get back much more than they have lost.
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