Warrior Love
By: Tom Grasso
Tags: Aging, Love, Courage, Romance, Truth

Warrior Love

The waning Autumn seems to have announced it’s intention. Fall seems ready to surrender to the coming Winter. Who, though, will bring a hope of Spring?

With any luck, it won’t be long until I will be searching for the single drops of Spring being born from skinny shards of ice dangling from mountain trees. I will be leaving footprints in the mud left over from forgotten snows, sliding sometimes-painfully down the trail I so desperately want to climb. I only ask for another. Please, just one more climb.

I am at that stage in my life that even the youth of a couple of years ago seems a distant memory. No, I am not “old” as old may go, but I know truthfully that the number of Springs I have left in me are smaller than those I have left behind. What once seemed like a wild adventure is settling into something new which is, of course, a wild adventure of its own. I can no longer overlook the coming Winter in the hopes of getting muddy again in Spring.

When time seems no longer on your side, you begin to take life in smaller increments. Seasons, not years, are to be celebrated for their promise as well as their completion. Hours, not days, are to be honored for their potential as they are for their memories. It is no longer the end zone you seek to enter. You simply enjoy every yard it takes to get there.

Companionship, for me, has taken on a new importance. I have been, for much of my life, a “lone wolf”. I have many great people in my life whom I love with all of my heart, but I’ve never needed them around. I’ve been fine holding them in my heart and cherishing them from a distance, often honoring the places that pull me more than than those whose orbits I could stay.

Today I can sense a different story ready to be written. I want those in my world who share a zest for living, for companionship, for love and honor and integrity, close to me. I want to fill the empty spaces, and those that are emptying, with sounds of laughter and of ecstasy. I want to explore the rest of my life in a state of constant foreplay with one who seeks the same. I want a partner in this life for the remainder of it, an adventurous soul who carries depth, honesty, and desire into each and every day.

I know others who feel the same, yet exhibit such desire in acts of insanity. Dysfunction soon follows, as does the story telling and drama that come along with such acts of foolishness. Their fear drives them to coldness, to crazed acts contrary to their wants. I just want to say, “Please, settle into your aloneness. When you are at peace with the courage needed to love someone who will love you back, then find that person.” It’s a wisdom that shows me the value that age provides, a wisdom I once thought impossible.

Because love takes courage. Real love takes a kind of bravery most fail to find. It isn’t just sex with one person that proves love. Love is something that, if practiced correctly, leaves the lover flayed open on the altar of their own fears. It is also love, if practiced correctly, that has such a person protected against the beasts that sit in the pews scattered around. Wisdom whispers to the wise that all the fear we’ve been shackled with has but only one true purpose. That purpose is to give love something to prove itself to, and something to offer the one who loves you back.

The protector is one for whom the lover is flayed open. True lovers are both the sacrament and its protector, each at the same time, each as reversible as the surface of a hot spring.

You want to know real bravery? Lay yourself upon that altar and be the one who also protects that sanctum for another. No two more courageous people exists than lovers given to each other, who climb mountains together, and who slide sometimes-painfully down trails left muddy by the arrival of Spring. Together.

No more two courageous people exist than those willing to share warmth under a blanket in the middle of winter bound in an honest truth of their existence. The sharing of the blanket is easy. It’s the vulnerability that existing in warrior love that may prove nearly impossible. The warmth of the blanket is comfortable. The vulnerability offers extreme discomfort until, one day, you finally trust that the one you love truly loves you in return. That is what the protector offers his lover, proof that he is trustworthy with the softest parts of her existence. She is safe laying upon the altar of her fear.

In truth, I have fought so hard to get to where I am. I’ve stared death in the eye and repeated, “Not yet, motherfucker.” I’ve overcome my own trauma to enter this stage of my life ready to be flayed open and ready to protect her with all my strength. I’ve created a code by which I live my life, one that reflects decades of survival and rebirth, and of a fierceness of intent toward my own destiny. As I face another winter, I understand that I don’t have time to play around with half-measures and half-truths. I simply have no time to waste nor any fucks to give.

That means it is time. It is time to find a warrior who understands the nature of what I am asking and who fears the risks of walking the path together. I want her to fear the outcome as much as I do because, as I’ve stated before, that fear gives warriors in love something to fight for. Courage is not, after all, the absence of fear. It is the action of truth in the face of fear. We are afraid in love, but we act as though we have more to lose than fear itself suggests. Because we do.

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