Dropping some heart science

I haven't posted here in a very long while. A lot of things have been going on inside my head lately; maybe it has something to do with turning thirty soon. I don't know. Anyway, this is an excerpt from an email I just sent someone.

Last night I couldn't sleep. I put on Sigur Ros, the record with the symbols { }, and it was so beautiful, and I started thinking about what you said the other night, that love is the only thing we have.

For the past few years I've tried to force myself to stop believing in love. It seemed like this eternal paradox whose sole purpose was to torture us humans wriggling round Earth. I didn't understand if love was supposed to be something wild and crazy that completely consumes you, or something calm and sort of comforting and mundane. I knew I had loved and been in love, but at the same time I still felt completely lost, like this fundamental human connection was baffling to me and only me.

I remember struggling with these issues last year when I was ending my relationship. At one point, being in my bed and just praying to I don't know who or whom, for someone to tell me what to do, to give me some sort of answer. Praying, for me, is an odd thing. I haven't felt any meaningful connection with God for so long that it was a sort of symbolic throwing in of the towel, if you will. A last-ditch effort. And that night I had a dream, and in that dream I was on a train with E. I turned to him and said, "What is real love supposed to feel like?" And he smiled and said, "You know already. It feels like this." Then he touched me and I was immediately filled with the most wonderful, calm, peaceful feeling . . . like a warmth or sort of light radiating through me. I can't even describe it. But I knew it. I knew that was love. And I woke up.

So anyway, last night, struggling under the weight of Tylenol PM, I remembered that. Sometimes I think the point of all this mess is to keep fighting to uncover love no matter how many times you are stung. In all its forms. Is that what E.M. Forster meant with "Only connect"?

I have no idea what I'm writing all of this to you, but I just felt like it. Someday I will stop communicating in fragments.