Desiring Noah

(location: cross legged on my dining room floor)
(song: explosions in the sky, your hand in mine)

There’s this movie scene that has haunted me from the moment I first saw it. It puts words, pictures, movement, into the feeling that has gripped at my heart for so long, my greatest fleshly desire that has become my most intimate female insecurity. It’s become a fantasy that my spirit fights my soul over to stay sane and pure.
Sitting alone in my thoughts a little voice speaks ever so softly to pierce my fragile heart saying that is was I who allowed myself to feel this way- how weak I must be to let a simple chick-flick trigger these emotions that runs so deep, that how dare I subcome to such shallowness. But something inside me knows better than that. In fact that, I know I am not alone in feeling this way. I think it is safe to say that most of womankind longs to have this very scene played out before them:

Allie: Why didn’t you write me? Why? It wasn’t over for me, I waited for you for seven years. But now it’s too late.
Noah: I wrote you 365 letters. I wrote you everyday for a year.
Allie: You wrote me?
Noah: Yes… it wasn’t over, it still isn’t over

To be standing there in the pouring rain before the man you hold feelings for and have him look you in the eye and tell you how he had fought for you everyday for a year, even when you didn’t know it, and is still fighting for you. To have a man throw caution to the wind and ask to sweep you off your feet. Yes, there are so many holes in a chick flick movie that makes it ridiculously irrational and quite fiction. But there is a common theme that runs in each one that tugs at the heart of any female.
I don’t care who you are, there is not a woman out there who can deny the fact that somewhere inside they have a longing for a man to fight for her. No amount of damage, abuse, numbness she has been through, she wants her heart to fought for and won. While this might not be at the top of her priority list- every single woman hopes for a ‘Noah’. It’s in our created nature.

But Stephanie, how is this your greatest insecurity? My insecurity itself does not lie in that specific scene playing out with myself in the place of young Allie, but rather I fear that I will never have a Noah standing before who would be willing to write to me everyday for a year. My greatest fear (here’s honesty for ya) is that I am forgettable.
A few hours into the 20 hour drive to my new place of residency in Colorado I begun listening to John Mayer’s ‘Edge of Desire‘ on repeat. While yes, I do enjoy John’s musical talents quite immensely there was a line that struck so deep within me that I refused to let it go. Somewhere between time 6 and 7 my best friend who was driving out with me woke up and I decided to drag her into my form of processing, which usually starts out with “bare with me, but what if..” and by the end of a very long conversation she helped me vocalize two things (1) I had developed feelings for someone (and that it was an okay thing) and (2) Mr Mayer says it best when he sings “There I said it, I’m afraid you’ll forget about me“.

I had spent the the first few hours of my trip while my friend was sleeping trying to logically rationalize why my feelings were not valid. Talking myself out of something that I had yet to see if it even existed. Trying let myself down before I could get disappointed by something or someone else.
You see, I have always been the girl who has liked the guy who never liked her back. Lived in the shadows of unrequited love, afraid to put my heart on a line that no guy had ever drawn. Time and time again had been the only one who felt the connection, and why would this time be any different? After all, who says the connection was mutual and what’s stopping him from forgetting about me? The same thought process that had drug me down so many times before was once again grasping at my heels.

But for the first time refused to let it get the best of me, I let someone into the place I held my greatest insecurity and rather than scoffing at me as I had always imagined someone doing she simply looked at me and said “Stephanie, it’s okay to feel a connection with ______ (you thought I was going to give you a name didn’t you!?) you’re allowed to let your heart be true to itself and what you feel“.
And so I did, with a sheepish little grin I whispered “Ok ok, I have a crush on so-and-so“. And with speaking those words a weight lifted off my shoulders. No it wasn’t finally saying who the man was that I had felt the connection with, it was, for the first time, vocally putting my heart on the line with a safe person knowing fairly well nothing might come of what I felt- but for once I was being real. And it was invigorating.

The point of writing all this is not to announce the fact that I can admit when I have a crush but rather to say that I long for the “I want you so bad I’ll go back on the things I believe” and walk away from “I’m afraid you’ll forget about me“. I chose to let go of those fears go that had drowned me time and time again and yes, believe that someday a ‘Noah’ will be standing before me in the pouring rain fighting for my heart. And you know what.. I’m going to let him.