If Only I Had One Wish

I have a friend who is falling hopelessly in love. All day long, he thinks about her. They talk ridiculously long hours on the phone and on the Instant Messenger. It's affecting his studying, disrupting his school work, turning his life upside down.

I love watching friends fall in love, or just realizing that they can't get enough of someone. I love watching them twitch around and drift off, knowing that these feelings they have are both the best and the worst on earth. People are often jealous of those who are just falling in love. They wish they still felt those feelings. They think it means that something is missing from their relationships. This fading of those first uncertain feelings is cited as a bad thing, some sort of loss of magic, some sort of dying light.

I have stated before that my mania gave me feelings that weren't my own. They weren't genuine. They weren't the things I should have been feeling. Mania turned every feeling on its head, magnified it times three. Meeting new friends felt like a revelation, and these feelings flooded my head, a huge lying force of excitement, terrible excitement. People may think they these feelings would be wonderful in perpetuity, but it's simply not the case.

The functional reason why these feelings fade is because they are ultimately unsatisfying. They fade because they need to make room for better feelings: the yearning for stability, the joy of knowing so much about a person, the impression in memory of what it feels like to be in one person's arms. The fading of those initial feelings is what allows us to settle down, to find deep satisfaction in love, and to have successful and beautiful long term relationships. It allows us to push ahead in our relationships, find truth in each other, and to find new things each and every day to love.

I remember those initial feelings I had for Joey, and I remember them so viscerally, so strongly, and I now know that I don't need to feel them again for my life to be perfect. I felt those things at one time because that time was the right one, but now I have been given things deeper and more wonderful. Taking my medicine and sorting out the deceit of mania have afforded me two brilliant revelations. Those initial feelings only seem like the best feeling in the world, but they are truly superseded by the warmth and true joy that later come in their place. And I don't need a million trillion lifetimes to fall in love over and over again with Joey, because I get to do it every day.