Tears...and more tears

I can't seem to stop crying today.

Pretty tough, with my contractor friends going up and down the stairs behind me, to conceal the tears cascading down my face.

If I could walk away, abjure this( self-inflicted) suffering, make my heart tough and weathered as old barn boards under a scorching sun, I would.

Really.

But then I wouldn't feel, or explore, wouldn't reach out, hope or know the truth -- that love is worth aspiring to -- even if for a moment, a second, an hour.

There is some consolation in that, I suppose.

I've seen how people compromise. I just can't seem to do it.

I wish sometimes I were able.

I suppose the price for turning myself into somebody else is too high...just barely.

It's not as it I have a choice.

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On the surface, I don't seem like a person prone to fanciful flights.

I've worked very hard to overcome any obvious tendencies in that direction.

Love at first sight? HA.

Sweet nothing compliments?

Try that gullible lady on the next profile over.

Generally, unless I know someone pretty well, I just laugh off racy comments.

It's so hard to take any of it seriously.

But, I have discovered that I suffer from a far more insidious and possibly more dangerous form of the disease: literary romanticism.

If it's a scenario that could happen to someone in a novel (paging Richard Russo or Michael Malone) than possibly it could happen to me.

In my love scenario, there is wit. Seems normal enough, doesn't it? We all like a laugh, or at least a grin.

Intelligence -- it's nice to have someone who enjoys the thrust and parry of conversation. I'm sure I share that with most of you.

Passion (though tempered with realism). Who doesn't like a little excitement?

Then we move into the realm of the imagination -- and that's where it all gets a bit dangerous.

Dangerous to my heart that is.

I crave adventure -- and epic struggle.

Yes, those 18th-century moralists who wrote about the danger of reading novels for ladies were right, I suppose.

To be love, true love, some dragons need to be slain along the way.

It doesn't matter, really, whether they are my dragons or his, inner or outer barriers, the stuff of fiction or the grit of reality.

There has to be something at stake to make a prize worth winning.

Add to this a tendency to be impossibly tender-hearted, and we've got the ingredients for trouble.

Perhaps this is an overly refined, overly delicate, overly dramatic view of romantic life.

So sue me.

In my finely-tuned, introverted way, I'm bent towards drama.

I like to think of it as a particular kind of realism -- the kind that says that scars and even rue are badges of honor -- the ones we get for living boldly.

I don't always live up to my principles.

But I'd like to think that someday someone will come into my life who also sees love as an adventure -- and that we'll take our staffs and a pair of stout shoes and sally forth together.

Let's not forget the swords.

I can tell already -- "we" have dragons to slay.