I always want everything I write to be about love. I’m not even much of a romantic. It’s more that I don’t understand it and I’m trying to figure it out. I’m good at figuring things out, I’ve learned a new industry this year and I’m pretty good with people and I got all A’s in graduate school. But love’s a flipping mystery, so of course I’m obsessed.
There’s this problem. I love terrible people. I love wonderful people as well, but generally they are friends and I welcome them into my life and heart and collect them and can never repay them for how much they’ve given me and so forth and it’s beautiful but not so intimate. It’s the terrible people I fall for. I didn’t always. But somewhere along the line I lost my way and now I want the charismatic ones, the dangerous ones, the ones who don’t want to be kind to me. OK, I always wanted the dangerous ones. And I let the terrible people in too, and they swoop me up, give me passion or fun or excitement or best/worst, all three, and break me.
I’m rubber-cemented together. Don’t look too close, the cracks will show.
There’s a person I’m currently allowing to see the spots where I’m bound with glue, imperfection by imperfection. I don’t know how I feel about this person. We weren’t supposed to be about feelings, we’re not a couple or even involved per se, but when you show yourself to someone, something develops anyway, whatever form it takes. I know he’s important to me. But when I think about love, and what the implications would be, I can’t seem to decide if affection and desire have to add up to anything, or whether they can just be what they are. They’re pretty tasty, served as is.
But to figure it out, don’t I have to know — what is this love thing anyway?
We use that word for so many kinds of feelings. I love my cat, but I don’t love my cat. I love coffee. I love my nieces. I love my friends with an abiding passion, but not a sexual passion (95% of the time…ish…tee hee). And then…that thing.
I don’t get it. I don’t get it! Once I promised to love someone forever and I thought I would and then I changed and he didn’t and I didn’t love him anymore. I thought I loved this other person but it turned out I was brainwashed or something and he was just trying to make me into a him-serving robot. I’m pretty sure I had the real thing once but that was so long ago, I might just be idealizing him — idealizing us. We were a pretty good us, once, I’m certain of it. I mean, I guess we were.
And I’m getting older and I feel like maybe I’ve done most of my changing, and I’d give a very important body part — liver? both kneecaps? — to meet someone who fits with this thing that I am. I’m a collection of paradoxes, like anyone else — I need plenty of space and tons of cuddles. I need someone smarter than I am who wants to learn from me. I need to be perfectly self-sufficient and also for someone to hold my hand when I’m terrified. Which is, you know, all the time.
Is love when you don’t care that the other person is complicated, or when the complications are the roadmap for the rest of your life and it looks like the perfect adventure? Is love when you smile just knowing that the person is in the room, even if you can’t see them (I actually feel that with people I’m not involved with all the time)? Is love ever the same for any two (or more) people, or do we kind of have to hope that our experience of love is complementary to our partner’s?
I don’t know anything. I just kind of miss it, and hope I recognize it if it ever shows up again.
