Sunday, November 15, 2009

Love

Which idiot said that love was ever going to be easy? Or understandable? Or capable of being slotted into pretty candytuft categories? Love is so real that it hurts with a pinch and so pungent that it can be elixir or poison.

You can lie in noisy corners, fearing the worst, hoping for miracles and all your loving, hating and loathing points in the general direction of love.

Ships that have sailed now have left behind harsh footprints that cannot be wiped off from the sand no matter how hard I try. I can’t wear the wind to shield myself from life, but that’s exactly what I am doing, dressing up moments in shades of violets and roses, giving them names to make them feel more ‘mine’ but in the end, one day, I will open my eyes and it would all have gone away. As moments always do. As people always do.

And then I smile, because I remember that all of this is one great carnival called life. It’s my carnival. I bought the tickets to the rides that rile me, pump my adrenaline, make me laugh, make me cry; sometimes even make me think that I’m going to die. But I like this illusion; it feels very…real.

I’m not wounded, despondent or agitated. I’m only stuck in the wonderment of the absurdity of it all. Where does it all end? What does it mean? Is what we get, that which we truly desire or do we learn to desire what comes our way?

Is it really possible to love without wanting possession of it all? Without needing to have a social security number that comes with a relationship? That’s what it is, right? A social security number, two people fall in love, hormones get going, then they start making these happy public appearances and that becomes their combined social security code. One of them breaks it and both suffer for it and thus the complicated urban dating ritual.

That’s what its become, love – a complicated urban phenomenon. Do we even care anymore to know if what we feel is an emotion that comes from some strange part of our heart or the heat from a definite part of between our legs or an unexplained need to belong. We call all of this and more just one four-letter word, and it doesn’t matter if that word is ‘love’ or ‘fuck’.