Heartache

I guess there are two kinds of love, each accompanied by its own brand of pain. The first is that love that surrounds you, embraces you, but never penetrates the recesses of your heart. I think many children of alcohol and chaos know this love. They have a need for human contact, for a stunted kind of intimacy despite the fact that they can never fully open themselves to it, and inevitably they know this leads to foreclosure. While it exists, it is warm, comforting, and familiar even as it begins to slip away. They will lose friends, lovers, spouses, and if given enough time, even their children (the most forgiving and patient of all). And they will watch the familiar play unfold, act to act, without the possibility of rewriting it. The pain they endure is lonely, desolate, and unrelenting.
Then there is the love you let into your heart. It must have been created by a bipolar deity - it is euphoric and crushing in its power, and it is the only kind of love that breeds hatred. I don't know how the children of alcoholics learn this love, how they learn to trust it, how they cope with it. I guess it is a lot like alcohol itself: Warm and inviting in embrace, fun and giddy in abandon, and cruel and vicious if abused or neglected. Only the bravest of those whose family love was beaten into them endeavor such a risky venture. Trading a familiar, dull pain for the cruelest enmity of all - betrayal.
Imagine the child, surviving, learning how to protect herself, how to withdraw from the daily nightmare no one else knew, growing up to offer that untouched heart, that virgin portal to her soul to a stranger. Imagine the risk. And he will come offering, begging for access in the name of love and unity. She will open her heart and learn the pleasures and peril of that level of trust. She will learn new emotions, new forms of insecurity that only come from fear of losing that which you could never hope to hold. And if she prevails, doesn't sabotage her own desperate desire with caution and distrust, she may gain what so few of us seem to obtain. But if she does allow him in, gives him every ounce of her heart, and he betrays that gift, the pain she suffered in her childhood will pale in the shadow of the carnage to come.
I don't know how these children learn to love, learn to trust, learn to share. I don't know how they survive intact, willing to open themselves fully to the possibilities of love and life. I do understand the friendship of loneliness, the security of a consistent, familiar pain.