I have been afraid of love for a few years now. I’ve started to view it as a kind of mental illness. It can certainly make you do crazy things.

I’ve been in love. A few times. The last time I fell in love, around 15 years ago, I very clearly remember thinking, “I hope this feeling doesn’t change.” Of course it did. Every time I’ve fallen in love, or even just in like, it has faded, and I get out. I don’t trust myself anymore.

Maybe it’s just how I’m built; very independent, skeptical of everyone. I’ve never kept many people close, so I don’t have a lot of people. This is fine. I’m more comfortable now in my solitude than I am when bound to another by emotion.

Love also scares me because at its strongest, it will make you make sacrifices that appear just insane. For a few years, I’ve been watching my mother slide into a dull, emotionally taxing life of doing nothing but watching over my father. It’s been, for the most part, a slow decline. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s well over a decade ago. In the last several years though, the disease has started to rob him of nearly everything. He now weighs almost nothing, and has a hard time communicating what he’s feeling or wanting. Mostly when he speaks now, it doesn’t make any sense. He falls down a lot and my mom has to keep a constant eye on him. A hospice group came to their house yesterday because getting him to doctor’s appointments has become an almost impossible job.

My parents have the best relationship I’ve ever witnessed. My mom has known my father since she was 14. They got married days after she turned 18. They had to elope because my mom’s family was devoutly Catholic, and my dad was divorced (he is 13 years older than my mom), so they wouldn’t have been given permission to marry. My dad always treated my mom as an equal. They built the house they live in, the house I grew up in, by hand, paycheck by paycheck, board by board. Most of my childhood was spent playing on a construction site, while they erected this house, then spent well over ten years finishing the inside. My parents rarely fought, and I was never in question as to where their devotion lay. It was to each other. I see couples all the time who have children, and then their focus shifts from being all about the other person to being about the child. I never felt like that was the case in my family. Which is fine. I’m not sad about that. I am very loved.

But now I’m watching my strong, independent, fun- and adventure-loving mother’s life contract into this tiny focus of making sure my father doesn’t hurt himself and that he has what he needs. It’s like he’s reverted to being a large toddler. It’s reached the point now where I know that it will be somewhat of a relief when this is over. When things first started getting bad, I could see the strain on my mom. Like every condition though, she has gotten used to it. It is not good, but it is life. My aunt, my mom’s sister, recently moved in. That’s been a huge help, if for no other reason than that it gives my mother someone sane to talk to.

So I’m watching this slow devolution of life, seeing my father growl “No!” in frustration right in my mother’s face, which is something he never, ever did when he was well, and all I can think is that I don’t ever want to do that.

I don’t want to fall in love and spend decades being so close to another person that they know me as well as I know myself, and then watch it slowly slip away. I don’t want to help them take a shower, or use the toilet, or have them yell weakly at me when I’m just trying to figure out how to help them. But then, I’m sure my mother didn’t either. She promised in sickness and in health, though. And she meant it.

I’ve been spending the last five years since finally taking my eleven-plus year relationship off life support telling anyone who will listen that being single is great, I’m never dating again, never falling in love, certainly never getting married – what’s the point of that? People change, love fades, and I’d rather not feel the pain. I’d rather miss the party altogether than feel sad when the party is over.

Then last year I purchased entry to a bike tour chosen at random and planned a vacation, and three weeks ago my independent, happily single self got on a couple of airplanes, and the worst thing I can image happened.

I met somebody.

He welcomed me in, and literally rode around our overnight and layover towns on his bicycle looking for me, pursued me and listened to me, and talked to me, and he won me over. My defenses began to crack on the long, uphill walk back to camp the first night in Marquette. Little piles of dust from my compromised fortress walls began to form by the second night there, and things started looking very bad on the playground swings. I didn’t really lose control of the situation until Munising though, on a tour boat on a beautiful evening in a beautiful place. By the time I went to my tent that night, everything had changed. I’ll never forget how he asked if it was okay before putting his hand on the small of my back.

So I came back to Florida a different person than when I’d left a week earlier, and felt like I’d left something of myself behind, but it was not lost, it was still connected from far away. There is a thread of energy between me and this man that is almost palpable, stretching across 1,200 miles. There is a lot I don’t know about him. There is a lot that I do, like that he feels things for me, which makes him crazy, of course. I’ve started imagining a lot of possible futures with him in them.

We saw each other again the week after the tour ended. He drove an hour and half to spend time with me while I was in Southfield for work. We both wondered what would happen here, back in the real world where we are both other things than cyclists. Maybe it was a magic that had existed only within the confines of that week away up north.

But it wasn’t. The feeling of magnetism was stronger than it had been, even. Have you ever met someone that you literally don’t want to look away from? Who you don’t sit across from because that’s too far away, so you’re that sickening couple sitting next to each other at dinner? That was us.

So now we text and talk on the phone and like each other’s Facebook posts, and will see each other again in, as of today, two weeks and four days. I go to sleep at night imagining the moment I finally see him again.

And what am I doing? Calm down, though, I think. Because even in my fierce independence, I did always say that if I ever met someone who made my good life even better, well, why would I refuse that? Is that what’s happening here? Or am I jumping the gun? What’s going to happen? So many questions, almost everything is an unknown.

Two weeks and six days ago I was completely happy with my life. Now I want more. How exciting though. Maybe this will be good, great even. The entire future is open, dazzling and bright and full of possibility. Anything can happen.

Maybe it’s a crush, a fluke, temporary insanity. Maybe nothing will come of it. I think back to the moment I last admitted I was in love, and I worry. That faded, this may as well. Maybe in two weeks and four days. Maybe in a month, or a year, or in thirty years. If there is one thing I can solidly say I’ve learned so far, it’s that I have no idea what is coming. I never have, and it’s all gone okay.

Yes, maybe it is just a form of mental illness, a chemical reaction in my complex and unfathomable brain. Then again, it could be a tether of pure energy that living things sometimes are lucky enough to encounter.

Maybe one day I’ll be very sad that the party is over, but having gone to the party will make the sadness worth it. Maybe I do want to do that.