The Kool-Aid Drinking Relationship Anti-Christ

I have for as long as I can remember been the relationship Anti-Christ.

I lived in blatant disregard for those who had found happiness. I scoffed at romantic gestures and vomitous cutesy acts that portrayed every cliché known to man. I looked for the elusive shoe to drop and the bottom to fall out of everything, leaving me in a pile of chaos and sometimes despair at my own lack of ability to make things happen.

I had had that great love once. So I thought. I was young, naive. Things were blindingly perfect to my 15 year old self. That one seemingly perfect match that left you to contemplate the very validity of everything to come after. To compare and contrast every imperfection and flaw of those who tried for years to fit that mold once cast by juvenile fixation.

All failed despite my greatest efforts. I would stick things out for roughly a year or so, and then it would be over. Sudden and quickly like the end to a movie. Credits rolling, thanks and blame handed out and then fade to black.

I don't fault them all really, though in the latter stages when I found myself in abusive and dysfunctional relationships I certainly laid the blame where it was obviously due.

None of it had been right. There were little moments that alluded to hope that maybe, just maybe something was possible. But they were few and far between. I would feel a disconnect again and slowly but surely sabotage any shred of goodness there may have been. I would point out the obvious flaws, exaggerate them. I would look for an escape.

And I blamed that first love. That picturesque story I had in my mind. The old fashioned courting with letters and phone calls. Doors held open, the car door opened for me. Seemingly sweet gestures.

And then I came to a realization that I had been delusional, even then. I would spout off poetry and harbor grand thoughts of a happily-ever-after. I had seen those romantic movies with happy endings. With white filly dresses and veils and I would know that someday, that fate would be mine. That my Prince Charming would swoop in and we'd ride into the sunset.

What a crock.

I had been too young to know that the man I based all these feelings of hope and of love was not who he set out to be. That he was a smooth operator, bi-coastal and a Marine with a woman at every port most likely. As I came to know him again as an adult, the clearer it was to me that I was utterly wrong about his character. What little he actually had.

So years and years of callous cynicism abounded. Proved right in my own silly justifications of being abused, cheated on. Those fantasies I once held on to so tightly, fell from my heart and hands and shattered like fragile glass upon the hard ground that was reality. A million pieces of my former self left in pieces, shards and jagged edges everywhere I looked.

And yet, I've melted. The Ice Queen I have been so familiar with, stripped away by something and someone I never thought possible. A feeling of happiness, of utter contentment and of raw emotion that I didn't think I had in me.

I drank the Kool-Aid my friends.

Sucked down in one gulp all that I had abhorred in those romantic endeavors. All that I thought was complete and utter bullshit, completely consumed by. Thoughts incessantly of that one person. A smile creeping on my face at the most inopportune moments in memory of a smell, touch or experience.

I am who I never thought I would be. Wrapped up in this lovey-dovey mush I once scorned and looked down upon.

And to tell you the truth, I am loving every pathetic minute of it.