Soulmates can be best friends. Best friends can be a different sex from your own. I can live with my best friends for my whole life if I want to. I can raise my own family with my chosen family (friends) and live together if I want to. I can love in many different ways. Infinite different ways, and be giving and sharing and passionate with many different people. I can chose to keep loved ones close. I can chose to have a community in an "alternative" lifestyle. My lifestyle. This is the beauty of freedom.
Humans are made to love in more ways that we often give ourselves a template for. I have been given the gift of experiencing this. My birth-given religious traditions make no room for this. It is real. I do believe in Christ and Jesus and the Holy Spirit. I know it to be true. But I also know many other beautiful things to be true. Our God is not contained within the confines of tradition or social construct. The way white people have chosen to constrict God through their methods of Christianity is opposing to the divine truth, and the all-encompassing love that Christ gives to those who seek Him. If we truly want to find Christ, we need to read the gospels on love, get over our tradition and pride, and take a long ass hike through the world; through the fields of discomfort, through the crowds of strangers and dare to challenge ourselves in what is difficult, to learn to hold life in it's purest form.
True, Pure, Infinite Love is ours for the taking. All we must do is allow ourselves to be open to it.
---
Upon rereading this, I know it is cryptic. I am talking about the church being anti-gay and anti-premarital sex. I have lived a life which has proven to me that honoring our sexuality is an essential part of forming love with ourselves and with others. My first real, true loving relationship was with a gay man. This relationship had whole, filling intimacy, with waxes and wanes of giving and receiving care and love. This man was the first person in my life to see me as I fully am, and to embrace and love me enthusiastically for it. In breaking up with him, I have had to relearn how to feel love, knowing that he gave me love in a bigger way than I even know yet how to give myself. When we were together, our love for each other was overpouring. I had extra love and energy to spare. But somewhere along the road, his grief and pain of his past and the way he views himself hardened him, and I was no longer granted access to the depths of his heart and mind. This lack of intimacy was the largest loss, but the shift of our relationship to become one of friendship has not been easy or comfortable. It is painful, and I have resolved that it may be painful for a very long time. But that is okay. Grief is a beautiful thing, and I am capable of moving forward and loving others and myself regardless of how I feel for him. He will always be there, and we still continue to love each other in our passing moments.
I have been blessed. I have experienced a taste of true love. Its overpouring, infinite nature. Grief of any size can not fill that. Nor need it. There is no way to express how truly and deeply it was, is; and at the same time how beautiful, true, right, loving and good it was for us to part ways as significant-others. I do not regret any single moment of the last few years with him, or the moments since we decided to part. All involved positive growth and love.
Love is listening. Love is embracing. Love is forgiving. Love is empathizing. Love is being selfless, not because you think you should but because you genuinely, deeply want nothing more than to be.
