  I always believed in that storybook kind of love, where you meet the person you are supposed to be with, and you just know. I never knew quite what form this would take; it was the ultimate mystery. It consumed me for many years of my life, searching for this one person.
People would sigh when they heard me talk about it; was John still obsessed with this? Hadn't he grown up? That kind of love is like santa claus - it only exists for children and in movies. I suppose I was a little bit obsessed. Imagine knowing , beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there was someone in the world that completed you. That you could finally, after decades, stop feeling alone. I had faith that I would find that someone, but I had to keep looking. It didn't help that my parents had been desperately in love before my father died, as I had quite the example right in front of me. When college started, I started to become bitter. I was angry; I had never had a boyfriend, I felt like I was behind the times. Everyone else was dating, I thought, why not me? (Insert whine) I was a thirteen year old in an eighteen year old's body. I still thought there was the one person for me, but I started to suspect that I would never find them.
And that made me terminally unhappy. Sometime around my fourth year of college, I stopped believing. Probably the healthiest period of my life was that year, when I wasn't looking for anything aside from what was in front of me. That was when I started doing theater at Oberlin, and my singing really took off. I made two of my closest friends that year - Keith and Bacilio - and really started to repair my image of bitterness.
I began to really focus on what mattered in the world, and my resolution of the people around me became finer and finer. The cliche is that, the moment you stop looking or believing, or whatever, it hits you, right? Well, as is usually the case with cliches, that came true. An oft bandied about metaphor for our internal structures is that of the House; we are each a house, with rooms and things in those rooms, and this is where we live for our entire life.
Lives, like houses, change over the years. You get new furniture, and add a sunroom. In every House, there is one room that we never go into; every shameful thought, fear, and awful thing we have ever done is in that room. When I met him, he walked out of that room. I told him at some point that he was like rain, and my entire body was covered in burning wounds, and that when we were with one another, he would pour down on me, and I would stop hurting. We were circular, a force to be reckoned with. Time flowed like water, having little or no meaning any longer.
When we were together, the silence was filled. At some point, I suppose I'll try to write about what it feels like to be in love with your soulmate, but I feel words failing me this morning. It was the best and worst thing that has ever happened to me; at the same time I was proved right for believing in that storybook love, it was also proved that I would probably never have it. That's a story for a different post, however. 
