Biten and Bleeding

Last week I discovered True Blood on my HBO on Demand. Within three days, I devoured season one. Despite its often gruesome explicitness or maybe because of it, I felt deeply connected to it, addicted to it. There were so many themes, I understood. Most left me feeling raw. Death, sexual boundaries, the unexplained walking out of people. None of these connections are pleasing, all are immensely complicated and personal. While I would not ask to go through this (like people who sign up to watch Schindler's List on a Saturday afternoon) it is healing in its assault.

There were some demons I communed with, threw salt on and put back in the box, but others, others are out and about...

I bought the first book in the series (note the obsessiveness) and I lay in bed reading last night until midnight. I admit I was skipping ahead to all the good parts (after all I know what happens).

There was this portion where the central lovers are getting together for the first time. It's hot an steamy. It's romantic in its dark and twisty way.

They are all hot and heavy when the man stops and he looks at her. He's realized she is a virgin, that she is vulnerable and breakable.
So he stops.

Pauses.


Waits


to make sure she will be ok. And when he stops, he says one word:

"Darling"

I burst into tears.

I was reading, I was happy, I was fine. But here are the sobs and tears and I don't really know why.

"Darling"

The author noted that it is an old fashioned word. I think to myself of the last time I said it, because its a word that i use. I used it last with college lover, slipping up as he told me about his dog dieing. So intimately I had used it. "Darling" as if it was secret code for "I love you, my heart breaks with you. I want to heal you."

I flash forward to a time when I needed to be healed. Having a panic attack, Will holding me. I was naked in every way possible, stripped to core, cowering on the corner of his bed in a ball. He pulled me close to me, held me, rocked me, "its going to be ok, its going to be alright, we'll get through this" he said until I was calm again.

And there, I think, it is. I have no one to love and no one to love me. I feel empty in way I can't fully explain. It is not that I'm unhappy in my life now or that in my almost two years of singleness I haven't grown or learned to love myself. I don't need a man.

But frighteningly, I think I do.

I need to love, Deeply, passionately. I need to be loved to know someone is there to hold me, to sleep by me. Although, I am fine without it, I can live my life just fine. I'm not sure that fine is full. Even more scary is the thought that I'm not sure I'm really me.

I mean, I am the girl who feel in love at 13, at 18 and again at 21. I have more "in serious relationship" time than some people having marriages.

My biggest fear is that God has already given Love to me, and I can't have it again. If I don't believe that then I am simply impatiently waiting to find someone (A move which guarantees I won't find someone, by wives tale logic). I hate that wanting a relationship is seen as a weakness. I hate admitting that I am weak.

But let's take a reality check, who else is bursting out into tears from a vampire book?