Momma Doesn't Recognize Us

There's this line in the romantic drama The Notebook the older Noah recites when his kids ask him to return home and live with them again. His children are visiting the nursing home where he and his wife, Allie, are living. His daughter says, "Daddy, come home. Momma doesn't recognize us. She doesn't know you." His son agrees and offers that they can take turns visiting her on the weekends.

"That's my sweetheart in there. I'm not leaving her. This is my home now. Your mother is my home."

And I'm wondering tonight where that kind of love grows. Where does it come from? Who plants it, waters it and makes it last? Do we get more than one shot at this kind of love? Or only one? They say you never really get over your first love. Is this an ideal, something to comfort ourselves when the pain of loneliness wakes us up at two am and stares us toward the ceiling?

What of interwoven fingers and long comfortable silences; of snorting laughs and quirky moments?

Where do we find this kind of home?

This is my ache. This is the question I have been squinting at all along... is there a place to belong, a place to call home? Where I can be "I". We can be "we". Like we all are right now. Like we will be tomorrow. With all our flaws and failures and wreckage. My spirit cries for this kind of love. Sometimes it even leaks out my eyes.

Will there be a love deep enough for our longing to be us?

If there is, it's profound, and I have yet to find it.

If there's not, then the mask can stay. And that profoundly sucks.

I don't gather my doctrine from romantic dramas, but I think Nick Cassavetes hit at something exhaustively human. "The best love is the kind that awakens the soul and makes us reach for more, that plants fire in our hearts and brings peace to our mind..."

I need love. This kind.