Direct Mail: A Thing Called Love

Vikram
Direct Mail
Published in
3 min readNov 21, 2015

--

Dear Devon,

Yesterday was odd for me. You see, after being single for a few years, I started seeing someone this summer. Last night, we went out to mark our 6 months together at a quaint Italian restaurant in Frisco because that’s what couples do. Mind you, my capacity for love and romance is lackluster—not out of some gendered predisposition but rationale—that the dinner was just ordinary. A few hours later, chilling post Netflix, we broke up in tears. After she left, the memories and smells of her began questioning my decision.

There are a lot of things I could get into, the eight year age gap, or that she’s six foot and blonde (a four inch gap) or our careers but that’s not what did it. A small business owner, she is one of the better girls I’ve dated. Our early days consisted of watching reruns of Broad City and going to queer warehouse parties in Oakland. I often felt like queer spaces were one of the few places that a small Indian man and tall Blonde woman didn’t garner stares but compliments, and sometimes invitations not that we ever swung that way.

But it wasn’t that, it’s that by some principle, I’m largely uninterested or unaffected by love. I’m averse to the kind that is overly personal and obsessive. It isn’t cultural either, I used to be a swooner. Some people consider this aromanticism defective, certainly she did. But I enjoy being alone and self reliant more so than together. When I think of vacations, I think of going places alone. So I’m not sure what next for me or us. Somewhere over the last few years I’ve internalized John Cage’s hermetic buddhist philosophy…

“I’m entirely opposed to emotions….I really am. I think of love as an opportunity to become blind and blind in a bad way….I think that seeing and hearing are extremely important; in my view they are what life is; love makes us blind to seeing and hearing.”—John Cage

I read Lonely Souls and I wonder how much of how we see future selves is conditioned by our experiences and surroundings, certainly it is significant. By now, given that I live in the worst place in the continent to date someone and that I spend a lot of time in my work studio, I’ve come to see myself as suited to being a hermit. I think #JOMO-Joy Of Missing Out was made for me and I find comfort in that proposition. Where you say, “every minute I am alone is a minute I am spending away from my person”, I feel that way about work, friends, family…

Which is to say, I lean more towards universal over personal love, and freedom over responsibility. Seems like my relationships trajectory is all backwards, I was a serial monogamist in my 20s and now a free bird. So what should I do now? I don’t want to end up a man-fuck-boi.

❤ Vikram.

Direct Mail is a new feature where writers share their deepest thoughts on the nature of things with friends and family in the dialectic tradition of letters.

--

--