Love In A Hopeless Place

A few years ago, I sat across from my grandma, like any young girl, wide-eyed and curious.  I was curious as to why she had never dated or re-married.  I looked up at her and asked, and she replied, “Oh, honey.  I’m still in love with my husband.  We will be together again.”  Later, my sister told me that my grandma carries a picture of my granddad with her and every morning, when she wakes up and has her morning coffee she feels like he is with her.

We read the epic love novels and watch rom-com’s and other sappy love dramas and sit there wishing that our love lives could be like that.  We are told love isn’t like the movies and things don’t happen that way, but sometimes (all the time) I wonder “why not?” 

As women, we cannot help but be infatuated with the idea or the actual action of falling truly, madly, and deeply in love.  As young girls, we dreamt of our first kiss.  And now, we find ourselves daydreaming and wondering of the possibilities of that other four-letter word.  At least, for myself, I believe that the epic love stories, ones that mirror any Nicholas Sparks novel, are real.  I dream that one day I will have the same love that my grandma had.  I mean, who doesn’t want that feeling of a sky-high ball, that reaches over the fence and into the stars, world series kind of stuff?  Perhaps it is naive to think that all love stories are actually fact and not fiction.  Or perhaps I am another hopeless romantic hypnotized by Hollywood.  But for me, holding on to this one belief, this one hope, gives me that something else to believe in. 

What makes the great novels so epic is the luck and magic that surrounds that one moment—the one great kiss—the one heart-wrenching goodbye.  If we can experience that feeling in a movie than maybe magic will happen for us.  And maybe, after all, it won’t take blowing out a candle, or wishing on a shooting star.  Quite possibly, if we stop looking, maybe love will find us.  Or possibly it is right under our nose, and we haven’t stopped to notice.

As your last night hook up sneaks out your bedroom door or the guy you have been crushing on completely ignores you at Mags, it is easy to lose hope of the big picture of true love.  We wake up in the morning, not feeling pretty enough and walk down the hallway not feeling as good as the girl prancing across the quad in her daisy dukes holding hands with her boyfriend.  But in the big picture that is life, and we are in the smallest fishbowl.  If you have found your true love here, good for you, but for the rest of us there is a whole world waiting outside of Emory.  I, as a senior, know first hand that love seems unattainable when you can’t even find a date party or formal date.  But possibly, like every mother tells their hopeless daughter, it will happen when you stop looking.

Whatever mixed metaphor you choose to get yourself through the day, or whether you choose not to believe in the great romances of history, I will be here believing—because sometimes we need something bigger than ourselves to get us through a tough day or an impossible week.  My grandad died of cancer before I was born—so, I never witnessed the great love that my grandparents had.  But I cannot help to believe that it was a love greater than Ali and Noah’s in the Notebook.  I can’t help but hold on to the fact that if it existed for them, it can exist for me—along with the rest of the world.