My road love

Around this time I started throwing up blood.  I can’t say I didn’t deserve this slow cancerous death, just the opposite.  I had always had a sensitive digestive system, even when I was physically powerful.  I had to abandon my vices one after the other due to the ill health that lay under what was for the longest time a glowing skin.  Even when it became certain that I was suffering from something unusually long lasting, I attempted to maintain my athleticism, spitting what blood I could not keep down into the drain at the side of the pool, hoping it would not be so thick as to stay in place and I did kick up enough of wake to be sure to wash it down, such was my outside health even though internally I was rotten, as you have already accused me, I’m sure.

But let us not talk about death which is always so close that we must always make room for it at the table.  Instead let me define love.

We all bandied the word around so lightly, after all.

 I know you want to say that narcissists only love themselves, but in making that judgment you forget that narcissism is an overlay of insecurity with a false sense of self which is so strong that it actually assumes the specifics of the person’s personality.  Narcissists are obsessed with finding perfect love, so who better to define it?

Love is faith.  As such you can love a child or an adult.  The type of faith and the depth of it, the target and the goals of the faith all act to define it.

I had faith that if we ever got together, that our love could save me.  Not from the certain death we all have, but the certain mediocrity of life that I had.  I had faith in her as a person, just as I had faith in my children that they could carry forward my genetic material after I was gone, not that there is any reason for that.  I had faith in friends that they would be there to help me and it gave me the same joy it gives to you when I helped them.  And if narcissists love themselves, it is because they have a false faith in themselves.

That doesn’t mean that sex doesn’t play a role.  As to the girl, I also had faith that any sex that we had would continue to be extraordinary, although for me it was much less important than it was for her.  She could not accept me as a friend, because her faith was tied up in the sex.  Or so I will say for the moment. In due time, I will explain how having the ultimate faith, and the ultimate sex would bring it all to ruin.  But again I am getting ahead of myself.

I always had women coming on to me.  In this way we were the same.  She not only had men, but also women attracted to her, such was her beauty and power of personality.  She was a natural leader and drew men not just as sexual partners, but as followers.  Indeed, I was drawn to her in that way as well as sexually and when at first sex was out of the question, I looked upon her as a natural leader among men and women.  But this is not about leadership, it is about attraction.  You see no matter where I was women would come up to me and come on to me.  It was not the narcissism except to the extent that I exuded a false confidence in myself, easily pierced.  In addition, being a swimmer I often came in contact with women with very little clothing and my body was completely at ease naked or clothed as a result of long use both ways.  A sample would be, “You swim so smoothly.  I’m just a beginner.  How do you do it?” 

After having her, and after feeling we were a couple, I found myself immune to this, an immunity I did not necessarily want.  But such was my faith that she was the only one for me that it had become unconscious and my failure to understand it prevented me from circumventing it…had I wanted to.  Who among us would voluntarily abandon their faith?