There is No Love Without Pain

THERE IS NO LOVE WITHOUT PAIN


My aching heart races, my knees shake, yet my clenched fists fight the impulse to jump. Should I really leap into love when I’m totally blinded by confusion? Should I stop listening to the logical reasoning of others’ that race through my mind about the sorrows that love brings, or should I listen to my own heart crying out for something more than the loneliness that has been trapped inside it for, what seems like, a lifetime? Do I really want to submit myself to that much torture? The cold darkness of loneliness feels almost the same as a broken heart, so I’ll have to deal with the pain either way.

I should be happy there is a man out there who knows I’m severely abnormal and cares for me anyway. Tee Anderson knows many of my secrets and has kept them locked away in his mind. He tells me that I’m on almost every magazine cover he’s seen lately and that he doesn’t need to dream about someone he had no chance of caring for, when he stares at them. My eyes fill with tears and my throat becomes clogged by a stinging clump of anxiety, each time he tells me things like that.

It was never supposed to end up like this. I was never supposed to feel this way about him. I was only with him to help him through the agony of losing the love of his life to cancer. Even though he has worked through his grief, I couldn’t leave him. We became the best of friends.

I’ve been modeling for nearly a year now in the United States and many men have thrown themselves at me for my name, money and body. Tee has taken everything, including vicious rumors spread by the media about us, in stride, and has comforted me through my most difficult times. He has always been there for me and has held me close when I felt I couldn’t go out and face the world again. Even when I received custody of my eight-year-old stepson because of a short-lived marriage with a man twice my age, he didn’t think twice about helping me raise him. “The past is behind us. We need to look toward the future,” he has told me on several occasions. He has never judged me severely for my mistakes. He didn’t want me the way other men did. He was afraid of me, and, I was afraid of love. So, it worked out well, for about a year or so.

Lately, my feelings for him have changed. Every time he comes near me, I feel the heat of passion welling up inside my stomach. All he has to do is speak and my skin crawls with electrical excitement. When he walks in the room, my mind becomes clouded with erotic visions I could never have imagined just last year. I’ve always been focused and logical, but now my mind changes its tune on a whim, when I look into his sad, doggy-brown eyes. The words, “I love you,” are hanging on the end of my tongue every time he looks at me.

It is natural to be confused about love to everyone else, but not to me. I guess I thought I had love figured out, but never wanted to deal with the questions I still had unless it hit me hard enough for me to worry about it. I never thought that that would ever happen to me, due to the fact that I had no time for it to occur set-aside in my mind. I had complete control over my emotions. I mean, it has only touched me and gone away, in the past, leaving me heart-broken and lonely again.

My stepson, Joshua, occupied a large space in my heart, but, for some odd reason, my huge heart was not fulfilled. There was something missing in my life, and I ached to know what it was. When I look at Tee now, all of the pain and confusion of the past is nearly forgotten. Love has dealt me a heavy blow this time. I know that the feelings that squirm around inside my stomach are what my heart has longed for and my mind has dreaded.

Consequently, I can pretty much throw the control over my emotions out the window, because I can’t grasp them any longer, when he’s around. He pushes my buttons, and I feel free to lose control, falling short of physically hurting him, of course. He often jokes with me about wishing he could forget about my dangerous powers, so he could seduce me. He tells me that my beauty stirs his passions, but my God-given gifts stir his worst fears. The pressure of my expanding anger explodes out of my mind and shatters a nearby window or mirror every time he suggests such conversation, but he proceeds again and again on that same route anyway. He invites my anger and doesn’t fear it. I wonder, sometimes, what does frighten him about me.

Before Tee, I thought I had love figured out, due to my keen perception into the realm of other people’s minds. When I look into people’s eyes and probe their minds, I see everything. I see every thought, idea, memory, and experience that anyone I’ve ever encountered had locked in his or her mind. To me, quite literally, the eyes are the windows to the soul. I have seen that everyone has loved and lost at one time or another in their lives. I have felt their heart-wrenching pain. I have heard the screams of mercy from their hearts that never held an audible tone. Right now, I find it hard to distinguish their pain from my own.
What’s even worse about my deepening love for Tee is that I am not sure how he feels about me. I can’t see past those fearful eyes. I can only see of him what he is thinking at the moment. He’s very clever in that he blocks his thoughts of me away in his mind so I can’t see them. I believe that he’s got me figured out. He’s no psychic himself, but his mind has the most powerful defense I’ve ever seen.

At first, it was frustrating not knowing him completely. It, then, became intriguing that someone could evade my mind tricks, and I enjoyed being with him. I felt like a normal person when I was around him, because I had to get to know him using my natural senses. Somewhere along the line, that comforting feeling of being normal around him, turned into love.

My psychiatrist told me that me falling in love with someone I didn’t understand made complete sense. Dr. Raymond Bless has known me for most of my life. Without him, I wouldn’t be able to control the power that is within me. He knew that the first love I knew was that of someone who defies all of understanding: God.

At the age of five, He changed my life changed forever. I was a prisoner in my own world before that. I was a mute autistic savant who could memorize volumes of texts and write them word for word. I could swiftly complete math equations in my head that would normally take three pages of written work or a calculator for an expert to complete. My parents knew that the best hope for my future would be clinical testing while living in a group home. All that changed one night, when a storm hit Michigan and my parents had left me with unscrupulous neighbors. I wandered out in the storm because the thunder had sweetly called my name. The electrical current from a downed power line ripped through my body. The next thing I remembered, I was speaking to my mother six months later. I recited the prayer my mother, so lovingly, said for me several times at my bedside, even though she never knew how closely God and I were listening. My physical appearance had changed from that of a drab brown-haired, brown-eyed little girl to a child that illuminated light from both her lightly tanned skin and golden-blonde hair. My eyes were changed into that hue of blue that cuts into others’ minds and hearts when stared upon. The doctors were hushed by the miracle they couldn’t explain.

A year later, the memory of the vision I saw while in the coma tumbled back into my mind after reading the description of what God looks like in the book of Revelation of the Bible. He had told me, while I was in the coma, that I would use the skills He was going to give me to help the people He placed in my path throughout my life. His voice rumbled like a mighty river over stones. I looked up for an instant and was filled with both fear and love for this being I hadn’t known until recently. The transformation was painful and His love had deeply pierced my heart. Love, even from Him, involved a high magnitude of pain.

That wasn’t the only instance of love, before Tee, that affected my heart. My father ran out on my mother and I when I was nine years old. He told me that he hated me for tearing up our family by telling my mother about his affairs and that he never wanted a child in the first place. There was, also, my marriage to a man I thought I loved that took my heart on a roller coaster of confusion. It took me too long to figure out that the love I felt for Daniel didn’t fully satisfy my heart or my mind. His heart was weak, both physically and spiritually. Deep down within me, I had a soft spot for someone who direly needed my help. He took full advantage of this, though. He paraded me around like a trophy and kept me under lock and key. His jealousy consumed him. My heart had deceived me with Daniel, and I wonder what it has in store for me now.

It pains me to think upon Tee with all of these doubts about love that lie in my mind. I need to trust my own judgment with God's guidance, and not look to anyone else for my answer this time. What I don’t know about Tee could leave my heart stranded, I fear. Then again, it has never mattered what I’ve found out about him in the past. I have loved him more with each day that has passed. My conflicting mind and heart are doing battle inside me, and I must choose the victor.

My heart races with excitement and my mind whirls me into a slight dizziness as I approach him. My hands lie at my sides, unclenched, defeated. I am leaping into the darkness. God help me. My voice quivers as I look into his mesmerizing eyes, and say, “I love you.”


For more on Robyn, please read "Caring For A Suffering Soul"  and "New York City Calling" . For the upcoming novel, please read "Robyn's Castle"