a weak dime-store version

as i was meandering my way back towards my home through the maze of stop lights and marquees, a simple billboard caught my eye. in the plain script of plastic letters it shown brightly through the rain soaked perimeter, "there is a difference between responding and reacting, which do you do?" sheer brilliance flashed across my windshield, intermixed with lightning and a mass of precipitation. all of these years i have been simply reacting to things that have stumbled into my path, and as a result they have caused a forced mimicry as i mirrored their stumble. the quintessential difference between quickly reacting and fully responding is simplistic in nature. to respond requires thought, to react requires just that, action. a reaction is immediate, where a response is stirred by an action, processed with thought, and then acted upon. i have a notorious irish temper that has been ravaging my bloodline since long before we hopped the pond and settled on this mass known as america, and with simple reaction, i have let it get the best of me on far to many occasions. in other instances i have crumbled like a wall under the force of massive armies, letting tears break through my surface and letting emotion completely envelope me. on yet other circumstances i have given my heart out with no discretion, only to gaze back in wonder how it was so malignantly torn apart. i look back now and wonder how much easier life could have been for me with a little thought. for the entirety of my existence, or at least as far back as my memory serves me i have wanted to fall in love. not the weak dime-store version of a romance, but the full fledged, head over heels, home run in the world series kind of love, the variety of love that really isn't hidden anywhere for us to encounter. this has been my greatest handicap so far in life, proving more a disability then an enhancing condition. i want to see the sun rise in someone else's eyes, i want to dance in the rain, beneath the stars, and everywhere in between. i want to stroll hand in hand down the boulevards where i used to wander each night, carefully reviewing conversations that had gone so notoriously wrong. these dreams are for fools, their contents built and manufactured for martyrs. life will never reflect an old film or a well written expose on what the author was feeling. you can not relive what has already passed, rescripting and renegotiating each and every syllable of each and every line. the ones who wrote those lines and lived those romances were the ones unwavered by the relationships of others, they were the ones free to express themselves, and their love, without a model or previous description. now, as i sit in what has become my lonely north, i am left to contemplate and devise my next steps on this great voyage through life. i am setting a course not for safe waters or safe havens, but i am setting a course for response. i am setting a course for freedom which only god knows and time will time if i can find.