Phantom Stairs / The strange beauty of unrequited love

You know that feeling, when you’re walking up a staircase in the dark and you take one more step than you need to? I call it the phantom stair. You have imagined that stair so vividly that it’s absence feels like a betrayal. Instead of landing on something solid, your foot sinks through air. For a moment you wonder if it will ever make contact with the ground again, or if it will just keep sinking forever.

I think unrequited love, as they call it, is a lot like that moment. You invent in your (admittedly muddled) brain what the next step will be. He’ll say this, then you’ll say this, then three years later a honeymoon in Paris. And it all seems very solid to you.

Then he stops calling. Because he’s a busy guy, you reason, and this will sort itself out. Because you’re clearly perfect for each other. Because you will never meet anyone else that makes you feel so laugh-for-no-reason good about life. And you keep building another step into your wild imagination. Until one day you step and there’s nothing more. The staircase has leveled into a landing when you were so sure it was supposed to keep going. Keep going for as long as you both shall live.

And it is so, so easy to become bitter. To give in to the temptation to blame someone else for not building at least one more step. That step that we counted on, that we expected, that, in our minds at least, was meant to be there. So we lash out, or we sulk, or we get passive aggressive, or we give up on love all together. Because all we can see in that moment is what we don’t have.

It’s okay to admit that we’ve been thrown off balance when life doesn’t give us what we expected and hoped for. But we can’t stay there. We can’t live in a constant state of raging at the unfairness.

We rest, we recover our balance, and we keep walking. This time on solid ground.

Last summer I felt like the ground had slipped from under my feet, like I would never recover my balance. I had to grieve dreams that I had given too much weight to, out of wishful thinking and a fair amount of blind infatuation. There were moments when I thought I would lose my footing completely and become bitter and angry again.

But in the moments that followed, as I steadied myself and caught my breath, I saw that the place where I had arrived was oddly beautiful. I had been so focused on that next step, I had failed to see the good that had happened already.

In my infatuation, I had given myself permission to be bold. I talked about my feelings. I let someone in instead of pushing him away. I asked hard questions, and I wasn’t afraid of what the answer would be. I had persisted in being a part of his life, long past any hope that he would do the same. I had cared about what happened to him, without thinking at all about what he could do for me. I had turned a stranger into a friend.

It took a while, but when I finally realized that a friend was all he would ever be, I found myself, against my will, on unusually level ground. But there I began to wonder, what if I took this unabashed interest I had for this one person and spread it out a bit? What if I let other people in, made time for more people, persisted without shame in being part of their lives?

What if I just loved?

And I did. I loved a lot of people. My friends, my family, the kids I work with. I invested myself in their stories. I found joy in going out of my way to serve and love the people who are in my life, instead of wasting my energy wishing for someone else to do the same for me. And if it took being rejected to remember how to love, then in some strange way, I’m thankful that my plans fell apart.

Because now I’ve realized that love, real love, leaves very little time to build imaginary futures. Love only builds things that are real.