True Love and Monsters

True Love and Monsters explains the physics of love...about that first flight,about its gravity—how it lifts us when we're young and grounds as we age. It follows a runaway teen who learns to fly on blacktop courts and whisper salvation through summer screens, only to discover that some hearts can’t be saved, and that love, over time, doesn’t get lighter—it gets truer, and heavier. It explores how hope changes, how heartbreak transforms, and how the monsters we fear most sometimes appear wearing our own faces. It asks what it means to fly and to love deeply when the fall is all but guaranteed. And why we keep doing it anyway. - - - The Year I Learned to Fly When you’re 17 all love is still true. There are no false notes in you yet. No irretrievable mistakes, no years long dead ends or unforgiven sins to carry. Hope is still like wet concrete that has not yet started to harden into rationale and excuse. Faith, in yourself and what you feel, though hidden, is still as certain as air. I was a runaway then. Runaways are alone in ways that are hard to fathom and harder to dispel. It’s a kind of solitude you wear like a winter coat, afraid to put it down for fear it will be stolen and sure that you will need it because the cold of it is always waiting with you. Then one day a girl falls into you. Into the locked up cell of yourself. She speaks the unspeakable language you thought only you knew. The last of your kind, an extinct tribe. And suddenly something incomplete in you feels whole. That half crippled part of you is suddenly running. A faster gear. I'd get off my job bussing table at a mob restaurant and drive to her house at 3 am. I would tap on her window and we would whisper our innocence thru a summer screen until dawn. I swore I would save her and she swore she would save me. It was some holy murmur in your blood promising something as guaranteed as it was undeliverable. That was the year I learned to fly. gravity looked the other way. For a time On the blacktop courts I finally somehow soared above the rim and loneliness. I was certain then that happiness was a layup. I was sure if I could just shoot straight enough or jump high enough that heartache would never reach me. Much later I befriended a huge man eating himself to his eventual heart attack. "Sure...love is sweet," he once explained. "The hunger is always there," holding up one more donut, "but so is the hole." I can no longer fly as I once did. And though, when you’re young you don’t know better, happiness has never been a layup. Time like gravity is undefeated. The rim gets tighter, the shot longer. It gets harder to out jump heartache. The girl I tried to save ended up in a faraway city married to a guy that was sure he could beat the rage out of himself by swinging away at her. I did not save her. I understand now that I never could. Gravity stepped back in. He threw her down a flight of stairs. Left her in the basement dark for three days with a broken back. From the other end of living you remember that first sweetness. But you know now too. There's always the hole. The oaths we make to our first selves go bad when we become someone else, as we all do at least a few times, transformed by loss and its unwanted wisdom. We come to know love can be fleeting, but the pain, ever slow, is guaranteed. That there's no way to it, that full blown kind of sweetness... without the hole. But if love does not race as it once did, if it does not fly above the rim, it is heavier and so truer. It carries the weight of mistakes and the memory of dead ends. It whispers thru the summer screens of memory promising to save us, but also now about staircases and broken backs. Monsters do not hide under beds. They come as raging husbands and cellar floors. They appear at the bottom of shot glasses and in the mirrors we talk to trying to convince our weaknesses, mistakes and sins to disappear. They appear in sleepless nights and testify about what we might have done if we were smarter or stronger. If we were only somehow wise enough without our terrible mistakes or true enough without the scars that carve themselves like a map into our bones and hearts. That first kind of love has been replaced by wisdom or what passes for it, and the regret with which its bought. Happiness has become like the weather. Eternally forecast, but impossible to predict. The rain will fall no matter who stands beneath it. The sun doesn't ask if you are noble enough to be warmed. My heart, so familiar now with time and gravity, no longer leaps without a weight. I can no longer fly. But love feels truer now because my heart pulls against all it has come to know. I call that courage. WLM