Hi Pap!
It seems a bit silly that the first entry I would like to make in here is one about an old TV show, but this is where I am today and that is what is heavy on my heart, so I figure it has to count. Of course we have been talking about this since I started watching the series, but now that I am done, I just wanted to get all my thoughts and feelings out in a way that maybe makes sense only to me, but it makes sense non the less.
I guess the first thing I want to say is that I am so grateful that I was able to watch the whole series as I remember how much I loved it as a kid and the fact that I had no idea that I would ever get the chance to watch it again.
There has been so much for me in watching it and I feel even though I was caught off guard that I learned so much and grew so much from watching Vincent and Catherine's relationship as well as from just the people they were.
Vincent is wonderful and he is in someways to me the perfect broken human being for lack of a better way to put it. He knows who he is and has endured pain from just being different from other human beings. He doesn't really know why he is the way he is or where he comes from, but he knows that wherever he came from he was not wanted there, and was left outside in the cold night. He knows he was not a parent's great joy, love or dream. He knows that he looks like an animal despite the human man that he knows and likes to be, he knows also that he feels like an animal sometimes and can literally become an animal in a way that humans don't and that he can be a danger to anyone and everyone around him if the animal in him took over and that frightens the wonderful, loving and strong man that he is. He has known rejection but he has also known acceptance, he has known fear but has also learned faith, he has known weakness but also knows strength in others and in himself but most of all he has known the closest thing to perfect love in Father and the community from the people in his world and he is wonderfully loving and giving and imperfectly perfect because of it.
For someone so physically strong and frankly terrifying, he is the most gentle and beautiful soul I have ever seen. I am sure this is not literally true, but right now it feels that way, so I am going to go with that. He is a protector to those that need protecting, a caregiver, a confidant, a son, brother, a wonderfully perfect friend, and an all around amazing human being. He can kill with his bear hands in an instant, but can bring healing, warmth, comfort and peace with his strong embrace. He loves so deeply, strongly and what to me even seems perfectly as far as humans go anyway. And for a man who literally growls like a lion in anger, and can maul a human with just his hands he has the most gentle and soothing voice I have ever heard as well as the most tender, loving and soft heart. I suppose I could go on and on and I would still have trouble articulating all the things about Vincent that revived the child in me as well as a part of me that I had pretty much forgotten existed, and there would still be no words as he would say :).
So while the list is long and too great for me to master, there is the obvious thing about Vincent which is his love for Catherine. So much about his love for her floors me and melts my heart in ways that I am not even sure I fully understand. It's weird it is not in what would seem to be the most obvious way which is that I want to be loved by Vincent in Catherine's place, it's the beauty and the purity of his love for her, the uncompromising way in which he loves her, the reckless abandon with which he gives himself to loving her, the fullness and depth that he allows himself to feel for her, the fearlessness with which he loves her and holds absolutely nothing of himself back from her, the risks he is willing to take with his heart and his life in loving her, the grace and abandon with which he is willing to love her perfectly or to die trying, the certainty with which he knows of his love for her form the very beginning as well as the stubbornness with which he refuses to be deterred by circumstances that seem to get in the way of his love for her. He knows his heart and he knows who it loves and he is willing to give everything to that love and for that love. That to me makes him the best imperfect human I have ever known. I know it sounds silly to say I know him, but like I said to you before, I think I know Vincent and Catherine. I am not sure if that just makes me insane or what, but I would be lying if I said anything different. I can't help but wonder if that is why the show touched me more deeply than anything I have ever watched. I mean I have a ton of favorite movies, and characters and things of that nature, but not like this. Not even Arwen and Aragorn or Mr Darcy and Elizabeth or Jake Sully and Neytiri.
Anyway, part of the point of writing this is to process my intense feelings and attachments to Vincent and Catherine and to understand better what is going on inside me and what it is that their story awakened in me. I remember as a young girl when I watched a few episodes of the show, I thought Vincent was wonderfully handsome. I was surprised that watching it as an adult, I noticed everything that we would call ugliness in his facial features, but still thought that he was gorgeous no beautiful- in a way that my heart loved and can't help but smile about, and in a way that is impossible to ignore no matter what I saw on the screen of his features. He was absolutely beautiful! There were so many times when I thought he looked gorgeous, but more often I thought he was beautiful and I knew in my heart that it had nothing to do with the way he looked. It was something much greater and deeper in him that just engulfed him and made him the most beautiful man in the world. I mean I think it is amazing thatI have a boyfriend who by all standards is gorgeous and yet I thought Vincent was the most beautiful man in the world. I found myself comparing him to Brad Pitt who we all know is gorgeous and still he was more beautiful than any man I have ever thought of as handsome. If I had to choose between the two of them, there not a shred of doubt in my mind that I would choose to be loved by Vincent!
I know that what makes him beautiful and perfect is his heart, and his spirit, but I have to admit, I don't believe I have ever been overwhelmed by beauty as with him. Is that strange? Probably huh? And yet, I hear you saying no it isn't, and I even hear you agreeing with me that he was that beautiful. The question is why don't I understand it and why does it seem too large for my heart to grasp or contain?
I love you and I am grateful for the love with which you love me :). And as I write that, my eyes tear up because I recognize that it is the same feeling I have in my heart when I think of how grandly and deeply Vincent loves Catherine and yet I also recognize that your love for me and his love for her are different in someways- or are they? I don't know, may be they aren't really. I mean I am thinking that his love for her is of a romantic nature, so it must be different from yours for me, but then as I write that I realize that your love has often been described as a romantic love as well. I also just realized that his love for her was greater than a romantic love, because despite his romantic love for her, he loved her in a much bigger and grander way than that. He just LOVED her and I am realizing that there is no category in which his love for her fit completely. She was his friend, and his love and he loved her both romantically and none romantically and because of that his love for her surpassed everything. It was worth everything. For that to be the case, a love has to be greater than romantic, it has to be pure, it has be real, it has to be greater than any fear, or obstacle, it has to be YOU.
So I guess I am realizing that as much as I loved their relationship, it wasn't purely a romantic relationship, it was so much more than that. That is what made them wonderful. That is what made him wonderful. He loved her in every way with all of himself and that happened to include the romantic love. But really what it was was just the purest love he had ever known or felt. And the thing is I don't know if that just happened to him, or if he made a choice (it seems to me like he made a choice a long the way because in the beginning he was afraid of the fact that he loved her) but whatever the case may be, he had the opportunity to love fully, purely and well and he took it.
I can't help but wonder right now as I write this if my life could look anything as wonderful as theirs if I knew the depth of your love for me. I wonder what that would mean for me and if my life would be filled with such warmth and tenderness and romance from you :)! And I can't help but wonder if my choice to receive such a great love from you would make you smile more and fill your heart with anything more than you already feel because you don't need anything you see :)! You are perfect as you are. Although I do recall that while it is obvious that Catherine is the recipient of a great gift, Vincent seems to insist that she gave him just as much as he gave her and I would like to explore and learn about that more, because my heart seems to believe that to be true in a way that I don't fully comprehend right now. I wonder if just receiving your love and sharing a great romance with you would add a different kind of pleasure to you than the pleasures you already know. I am curious and I think I would like to find out.
Thank you for letting me talk/write your ear /eyes off. I am looking forward to continuing this seemingly ridiculous discussion because I feel very strongly that there is much for me in it.
I love you and I would like to love you even more and to know your love even more- the same way that Catherine knew and experienced Vincent's love. With that same depth and recklessness and abandon from the both of them. With the same romance, wonder and comfort. With the same passion, poetry and light. With the same wholeness, freedom, joy and fearlessness.
Though lovers be lost, love shall not- and death shall have no dominion.
with whatever love there is in me,
Always,
Me.
