A Game of Chance

This weekend I have longed for love. My imagination dominates every action, creating of even the simplest task a vivid daydream, complete with verbal (albeit one-sided) dialogue. I formulate elaborate scenarios, professions of secret passion, deliciously agonizing first dates, the moment between eye contact and physical contact. I see it all. I have laid in bed or on the couch imagining, fantasizing, wishing, hoping, praying like a fifteen year old girl with no experience to fuel her imaginings. 

But I am not fifteen and I have experience. I crave physical love too. A shoulder to press my forehead to, the light pressure of fingertips on my bare back, soft lips, and strong arms seem etched onto the insides of my eyelids; every time I blink, my heart rate rises. I ache. I desire. I lust, I covet, I need.

Two seemingly insurmountable barriers tower over me: One, my passion. Two, my fear. 

I am incapable of loving physically without loving emotionally. Where my body goes, my heart must be. When I was younger, my mother told me that to love someone, physically or emotionally, means you leave a part of your soul with them and take a part of their soul with you. I know that is not true for everyone, but it is resoundingly true for me. I have only loved once, have only kissed, touched, tasted once. How do I begin again?

However many times I visualize, even witness, the lingering eyes, the catching breath, I can never steel myself to act upon it. I have never been a gambler, never made the first move. I am far too afraid of rejection to act so confidently. I am thus resigned to my far too vivid imagination.

But I write this diary in homage to wonder, no? Perhaps it is time to awe myself. Perhaps it is time to risk it all.