The Joy of Love

What it means to know someone

Photo by Brendan Steeves on Unsplash

The Joy of Love

What it means to know someone

The other day I was driving back south to Santa Barbara from Lompoc via Pacific Coast Highway and 101, and I couldn’t help feeling joy.

I’d been living with my girlfriend for four days. I moved into her house. We’ve been together five months. It feels both like five minutes and an eternity, both in good ways.

Joe Pug played on my stereo—think of an equally poetic contemporary Bob Dylan but with a melodic, beautiful voice—and from his 2015 album called Windfall came the tenth and final track entitled ‘If Still it Can’t be Found.’

I drove 60 in the slow lane. It was a perfectly clear sunny winter day. One of those crisp, chilly January times, the ones you always forget about come spring. (But not this one.) Windows down, cool air rushed in. The blue, blue ocean to my right was bright and sun-streaked. I gazed lazily out the window seeing the green mountains to my left, the twisting, unfurling gray road ahead, the double yellow divider. Roads have always been highly symbolic to me. External roads. Inner roads. Life roads. Spiritual roads.

And that’s when the song started. Impeccable, acoustic guitar plucking, slow, mellow, melancholy. (Typical Pug.) The first line was what struck me the most: ‘There’s a road I have known I could always find.’ The track sustained my attention from there, my left arm out the window feeling the rushing air. I felt a warm, sentimental smile from on my face. I was very much in the moment.

My life Road has taken me many places, from the confusion of childhood to the certainty of rebellion, from the selfish alcoholism of my twenties to the adulthood of my thirties, from the beginning to the end of my monstrous, constant desire for things to go my way. (Always a losing struggle.)

The road I have always known I could find was reliance on myself. Being alone. Being contained in solitude. Backpacking in the mountains. Going on long road trips. Being with various women. All these I experienced alone, for the most part. Even when I was ‘with’ someone. Strangely, even during my chaotic younger years, I never stopped trusting some core part of myself. This allowed me to put myself through enumerable painful obstacles, and yet, it also saved me in the end. I always had an emotional escape hatch; I always liked to go right up to the very edge of the cliff but not quite leap off.

In the past few years I’ve found new roads. Different roads. Roads I never expected to find. A father with cancer. A short-lived stint in New York City. Writing on Substack. And falling in love.

That latter one is what hit me the hardest on my drive that day. It wasn’t the feeling of the air rushing at my arm out the window. It wasn’t the gorgeous, smooth, calm blue sea. It wasn’t the music, even. It was knowing that my inner road had forked. The real, true ‘road I always knew I could find’ is love. Not of myself—but of course that, too—but of another. I don’t remember what writer said this but it was something like, ‘Being in love is the shocking realization that another person truly exists.’ I like this. I believe it.

I think about Britney constantly and deeply. On that drive I felt momentarily lovesick, that poignant, saccharine sensation of knowing someone intimately, of being open and vulnerable, of walking through fear together. Half a year ago there was just me. My family, yes; scattered friends around the country, yes. But when push came to shove in ‘real time’ it was good ole me.

Not anymore. Now there’s a ‘we.’ I think much less about myself now. Not that I don’t think about myself at all. I’m a writer—I have a strong ego and sense of self. (Don’t all writers?) But more often lately I picture her. I think about us together right now. And us in an imagined future.

The real road I have always known I could find—deep down—was love. All my life I’ve wanted it. All my life I’ve been afraid of it. Afraid of sacrifice. Afraid of being less selfish. Afraid of breaking my deepest solitude. Afraid of falling. Afraid of being wounded.

Maybe it’s age—being 40 helps. Perhaps it’s all the emotional carnage of the past couple years—cancer, Covid, moving, depression, debilitating loneliness. Yet none of that explains this new virus of joy I feel. I feel it not just in my head—not just intellectually—but most importantly in my heart, the deepest part of my heart, the place where letting go lives.

I’ve learned: I don’t have to be alone. I’ve learned: Love is a charming two-way street. I’ve learned: Sometimes saying yes is better than saying no. I’ve learned: It’s easier to accept things as they are.

There is a road I have always known I could find. That road is the road I am driving now.