New Blog Site

Hi All,

I moved my blog site to a new site and won't be updating this one anymore.  Feel free to look up the other site at  www.andreabanandrea.blogspot.com

Andrea

Between Hope and Reality

 Hope for love can be destructive.  Dreams and thoughts can dance together forming a beautiful and dangerous tango.  Both influencing each other until reality is lost in thoughts, and dreams hold unrealistic hopes.

I tend to feel emotions quickly and strongly, including these hopes that can be destructive.  I have learned to build walls in the past year to protect me from this type of hope.  These walls have protected me from rejection and from the possible pain of love.  Walls that have allowed friends through, but never love.  These walls have allowed me to be myself.  They’ve allowed me to live in reality without skewing emotions.  

Hope for love can’t be locked up forever though.  Abandoning hope can be destructive.  Without hope the walls will swallow you whole and can hurt more than unrealized hopes.  The dance is safer, but not as beautiful with walls. Perhaps hope of love is worth the dangerous dance with reality; and abandoned dreams could still be a reality.  

A reality where walls were used for protection for a time, but were knocked down by discarding pretenses.  Where being open to the possibility of love allows for a deeper unselfish connection.  A reality where just maybe he feels a little hope too and a small glance and a shared smile turn into a shy hug.  Where hope puts a crack in a wall, and even if nothing but friendship comes, there is a glimmer, a spark of feelings, somewhere between hope and reality. 

The Echoes of Pain

He is in pain.  The worst type of pain, the type that includes a loss of hope, a loss of faith in others and stems from a loss of love; it’s a common life pain.  This pain runs deep and whenever it surfaces brings other pains with it.  Pains from other areas of life that seem to be buried deep beneath the surface yet always rise to the occasion and join in with the fresh pain.  This pain will go away, with time, but it may come again in the future, as part of the past pains when a new pain comes.  It could be prevented.  A heart can be hardened and protected, but can it ever truly be full then?  It’s a risk, to un-harden a heart, to try to remove the callouses and risk the pain.  The pain in the pain is sometimes from knowing it could have been prevented.  That it never needed to be there.   But it does need to be there.  To fully love, it needs to be there.  

There is pain in watching him.  A pain in knowing his pain intimately as it echoes my own past pains.  Echoes of pain that once slashed deeply and viciously with very little hints of mercy.  A familiarity with the loss of hope and love.  I know it is not my pain, but for a moment it is mine as it hauntingly echoes.  A shared pain, yet not shared. His pain real; mine from the past, wanting to cry out, "I know, me too!" and to soothe and comfort as the echoes resound through me.  But echoes are different from the real pain, even though there is a familiarity with the pain, there has been healing. 

He’ll be okay. He’s in God’s hands.  The pain is in God’s hands.  Someday, his pain too, will just be an echo.