I Am Needy

     Here it is.  I'm going to be as honest and blunt as I can be.  I make a lot of jokes as if my heart has never been broke but it's just a cover, a front.  I talk more about my emotions than most men but I'm still uncomfortable with them.  I find it awkward to talk about my feelings or to even acknowledge them.  Still, here it is.  Here's the truth.  I am needy.  I want love.  I need love.  I love love.
     Sometimes since the separation I've been so lonely I could barely stand it.  Men have accepted ways of handling this.  We use work as a distraction but mentally my work isn't very distracting.  We turn to alcohol and meaningless sex but meaningless sex is meaningless and I couldn't take the chance of turning to alcohol.  If I became an alcoholic my love may never have been able to come back to me.
     I haven't told anyone this but my love did come back to me sometimes.  Gone for a week, back for a week.  Sometimes gone longer, sometimes with me longer.  Then my love was here longer and longer and gone for only short periods and I got used to love again. Then summer came but it was winter in my heart.  Love was gone again for so long it became possible to imagine a life without my love.  It wasn't a pleasant possibility.
     Love leaves us all I guess or we leave it.  There's some comfort, though, I think when it happens naturally over time.  It's the abruptness that kills me.  Even when I know it's coming it happens suddenly.  It sneaks up on me.  I should be used to it, immune to it, by now but love doesn't work that way.  Love always manages to get to you.
     I have to learn to accept it.  This is the way it's going to be.  My love will be here then gone.  It would help if I could tell my love everything I'm writing here but I can't.  Who can really say these things aloud?  Besides, right now it wouldn't be good for my love to hear and right now my love wouldn't understand.  Someday, though my love will read this and I know, I can hear clearly in my heart, what my love will say.
     "Wow, my dad was such a girl."
     There are all these romantic notions of falling in love, finding someone we can't live without, and spending the rest of our lives with them and some of those notions are probably true.  There's this concept of soulmates but I find it hard to wrap my head around it.  I can't imagine a bond deeper than the one I share with my son.  I can't imagine a love more true.
     Here it is.  Here's the truth.  I am needy.  I need my son, Bradley.  He needs me a little more I hope because I need that, too.  When he's gone I don't feel quite right, quite happy, quite me.  When he's here I often feel exhausted and frustrated but I'm most likely smiling, too.  He's most likely smiling also and the smiles and laughter of each other only makes us smile and laugh more.  When he's here we are happy, I am happy.  To paraphrase Edgar Allan, we love with a love that is more than love but it is not I and my Annabel Lee.  It is I and my Bradley.  If that sounds cheesy or trite or kooky or melodramatic, future adult Bradley, I hope you'll forgive me.  I told you I am needy and besides maybe this will guilt you into coming to visit me.