The Illusions We Fall in Love With
I don’t know about you, folks, but I have a list of songs I associate with times of my life that left a mark. The deep emotions of a specific moment are so intimately connected to a song, or a few, that, whenever I see them or listen to them, memories start flowing, as if my heart was cut open…
Depending on how much time has passed since that moment, depending on many other things, actually, I’ll be experiencing different feelings. Sometimes it’s pain, cringing pain. Sometimes it’s placid yet benign nostalgia, a smile may creep up on my face, too.
As the intricate web of emotional imprints of the evoked moments takes over, I start reliving them but with my mind and heart of today. It’s like I am there, back in time and space, an invisible current version of myself, watching my old self tore between the naive attempt to break through the walls that I surrounded myself with along many years of emotional isolation meant to contain my introvert nature, and the act of dealing with the fears that come with it.
It was usually love that pushed me to unleash this often embarrassing public display of affection, through a song supposed to magically transmit my infatuation to the object of my desire. A purely spiritual desire, otherwise, the very thought of its latent carnality was nearly horrifying me, as the inception of an unspawned yet romance could only be entirely innocent.
Falling-in-love is such a deliberately egocentric act, despicable as it is absolutely voluntary. When I fell in love, I actually fell in love with what was entirely the offspring of my imagination, a random, entirely fabricated set of qualities I attached to the object of my passion, that had, most likely, nothing to do with that real person. And I do not mean it in a demeaning way, no. I believe that, in a normal world — one out of which we would take out the extremes, the criminals, and whoever would chose to not abide by decency and common sense, not even by the letter of the law — all the people are perfectly good for someone. That someone may be me or not. Most likely not. One has no idea, until we try, until we make a few steps, until our feelings would be luckily mirrored to some extent, and a relationship would eventually start.
And yet, that completely self-induced euphoria, the projections of lust, after all — I’ll have to give in to that, in spite of my efforts to leave lust out of falling in love — were so powerful that they dragged me into another reality, where that person took divine qualities, became a superhuman, a goddess whose purity was untouchable. Whose shell I would be doing everything possible to crack, to soften, to enter. While doing this, I would be hard-selling the very best version of myself, also automatically and consciously ignoring all the red flags which may have popped up along the way, pointing out to me that the object of my adoration might have been human, after all. In my blind, ego-maniacal pursue, I would be equally in love with the imaginary instances of my life next to her, still frames of a projected, perfect future.
Every way any of her body parts would move mesmerised me. Every word that came out from between those lips was soothing. The soft breeze in her hair, a tingling of fingers, legs crossed, random blinks, standing or sitting. Leaving, coming, hello, good bye, my name is. I was using each of those expressions of her being to weave an entire script in my head of how our lives could unveil together, not even that, of how she would just be and I would look at her, blessed to be a silent witness to her ephemeral existence.
I wish I could say I never talked to her. That I had chosen that all those movies I was directing in my head were to be the only version of reality there will ever be.
But I did.
