The Red Thread Collector – A Love Story

For thousands of years people have tried to pen words that explain love. Poems, books, romance novels, songs, even chemists and scientists have all attempted to give words to what love is and how it works. Here I add my humble choreography of sentences to the vast collection of writings about love.

I was still young when I stopped seeing love as a gift, and determined it was an impediment to my own happiness. Loss will do that to people some times. I concluded that if I loved no one then I would have no one to lose. It was a logical plan.  But, love is a strange intangible thing that seeps through the cracks of even the strongest fortresses. Life would send me people who would break down my walls and teach me the size of my own heart.  This is the story of how I unwillingly became the collector of red threads.

To me, love is almost a pain. It is an aching in my chest. It is a tightness that motivates me to do something or say something. Love feels like something attaching itself to me inwardly, becoming a part of me permanently. It is both an expanding and a restricting that simultaneously takes place in my heart. As a hurting teen I set out to avoid this feeling.

In my late twenties I looked around and found that I had only a very few friends and no close friends at all besides my husband. If my ideal was to live emotionally isolated and fairly safe from getting my feelings hurt by people, I had achieved it. I took a degree of pride in this accomplishment. I had successfully pushed away people all of my life. I thought that made me a fierce person like G.I. Jane or something. It seemed cool.  Sort of untouchable. Being a loner by nature, I might have continued down that path for the remainder of my life with ease. Why not? My emotional walls created a safe haven where I thought no one could break my heart. However, those walls may have protected me, but behind such high fences gardens do not bloom and without risking heartbreak I would be nothing more than small and selfish.

One day a long time friend told me “You are so hard to get to know”. I was perplexed. I am an open book. What do you want to know? I will tell you anything about me that you want. Isn’t that knowing someone? Perhaps there was more to it, and of course there was.

I took a step back and realized that in trying to protect myself I was coming across as cold and even snobby. I had been talking a lot but saying nothing. I was willing to give you the proverbial shirt off my back but I was stingy with my soul.  I did not want close friends, but I wanted to be understood. So I tried experiments in sharing more of myself.  Instead of telling people what I did, I started telling them why I did it. When I would tell them my heart motives, they would reciprocate by telling me about their own dreams and ideals. I had lived for a long time in the dark corners of my own mind. Opening myself up like this felt a bit like coming to a new school when you speak a different language and you forgot to wear clothes and maybe you realize at some point that you had something hanging from your nose all day. Yeah awkward. Where is that rock I was hiding in for the past twenty years and may I please climb back underneath it?

I never meant to love people. I just did not want to be a cold person who no one felt they could know. As I opened up so did those around me and then I started feeling that tightening in my chest. As I listened I began hearing familiar stories of cookie recipes, everyday chores, issue dodging, denial and family troubles, but they weren’t the same as before. When I shared and opened up I heard my own stories in the stories others told. They were more than conversations, they were tiny windows into their hearts. In the knowing of pain and passion in someone else, a part of them seemed to tangle with a part of me. That is where love begins.

I see love as a thin red thread. I don’t know why it is red but I do not argue with my imagination when it designates a color to something. The string connects from my heart to others, tied tight. Once my heart is tied to yours I become constantly aware of you. I always live just a little in your life, while you live a little in mine. This sort of sharing is love. This is why it hurts to be away from someone you love. The string is pulled taut tugging at our hearts. Love will eventually pull two people back to each other. Love is the center we return to when we get lost. Even when we are separated for a long time  or by great distance, the red string connects us. Some quiet part of our mind is always aware of the people we love. When heartbreak happens the red string remains. When the line is severed, the remainder of the red string hangs limply as a reminder of loss. Love may sometimes stop growing, but the love we have already experienced never dies.

I thought once, that loss ended love, but of course that is not true. Even death cannot destroy the red thread. Even when someone you once loved becomes unloveable the red string stays tightly fastened to your heart. That is why I was so afraid of love when I was younger. Because it never lets you go.

I am afraid to imagine what my life would look like if I had not become a collector of red threads. There is a hollowness in creating a life bent on avoiding pain. There is also a heavy weight in loving people. It was not very long ago at all that I became more keenly aware of my heart being bound to a great many people. When it might have been easy to dismiss my own life, I felt the pull of a hundred red threads at my heart. In my mind I could see those tiny threads wound around my heart and stretched out to distant places. At the other end were the faces of people who had touched my life. People I needed and loved. People who needed me.

So many times someone will say “I am terrible at keeping in touch.” Many times that is true, I know I am not very good at it. But I think that it is silly to measure your friendship or love for someone by how often you call or get together. I have not spoken to my Daddy in over twenty years. My love for him is not diminished by our years of separation or by his death.

Isn’t this why when we hear of a loved one being seriously sick or having trouble we call or reach out to them? Even if we haven’t reached out for years? Because love, real love, does not keep a clock. It does not care about age, time or space. Love fills us with panic when we sense that the person at the other end of our connections might be lost. Isn’t this why when we ourselves are faced with sickness or heartache we also reach out to those we love? We all trace our red threads back to their source. Love is the center, like the camp fire that gathers friends around it. We sit together and laugh and warm ourselves until we are ready to face the cold again.

My heart is tied up in a wild mess of red knots. It is chaotic and passionate and dangerous. It still feels dangerous to love so many people. I have so much to lose but I am blown away by all that I have gained. Looking back now I can see that I was so afraid of loss that I ended up running head long into it. I spent years shriveling away from friendship. When I was lost I wandered alone. I hid from love. But, it found me. It saved me. It tied my heart up and gave me purpose. Now I am never lost. I am never alone. I am a collector of red threads and when you need me just tug twice and I will be there.

G.R.

Thank you as always for reading. I am currently working on the rough draft of my first ever full-sized novel! While I am devoting myself to this huge project my blogs are likely to get neglected, but if you crave post apocalyptic science fiction stories, my novel will satisfy it! Forty thousand words down and 40,000 to go 🙂