Romance?

Okay so I don’t really know where this is going to end up going but something inside me is telling me to write. So I apologize in advance if my grammar and spelling gets ridiculous when I get carried away. I am basically in a state of limbo; not that I’m fiercely trying to beat it away but rather curiously eying these feelings and emotions with ambivalence.

So let’s begin at the beginning. I’ll try and probably fall short of fully explaining and organizing my thoughts, but I accept that.

I think this has to do with a couple of big things. First, the concepts of love and the certainty of love in another seem to be recurring themes in my life. I’m seeing it all around me, and finding that I can’t really make or get the time to question the events and situations that are flying by because I’m constantly struggling to just keep up with everyday life. Nevertheless, I am at least noticing it. I guess that’s some consolation. I see it in my friends and their relationships, their battles won and wars lost. I see it in the eyes of middle aged women with beautiful flashes of grey in their hair. They’re alone, but I always wonder, and the older they look the more I think about it: what flights of passion have they watched fly by, like little children glued to the window of a train? They try to reach out at the countryside but hit only cold glass. I think about this in a split of a second and have to keep myself from crying as I take their order…And then have to hold it back again when I find out what it usually is with these women: Decaf skinny single lattes. Can you live a little? Or are you sick of trying to grab at it, only to touch frost and your own reflection?

I’m getting carried away, and I’ve only just begun. Damnit.

I guess in my own roundabout way I’m expressing my fear that I will end up like one of these women, alone in coffee shops abounded with couples and groups of couples, laughing and holding hands and playing footsies. I’m afraid of showing my romantic side. Of wearing my heart on my chest. I can see thats what these people are enduring, a life so devoid of the exhilaration of romance, the cliche but nevertheless real string that links the eye to the mind to the heart, resulting in the feeling that it just got rolled off a thousand mile high cliff inside of you. They’ve never had that, or, if they have, the only documentation of it is a battered sepiatone buried away in a dusty sunday morning Inglewood basement. If it ever happened (again), they’d probably have a heart attack. It’s like that quote from R & G that Cassandra likes:

“All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it’s like being ambushed by a grotesque.”

I don’t want to be that.

And when everyone is writing about it or lamenting about it, its hard not to jump on the bandwagon. Where have all the soulmates gone?

I truly believe that while movies like the Notebook are cliche, love like that is possible. Inspiration for these kind of ideas doesn’t come from nowhere. Although one may argue that it comes from ultimate wanting and therefore, fantastical allegory is really the full extent of it, I would say that’s lazy thinking. You get out what you put in.

This feeling is something I can’t just put off ’till later. It has a sense of urgency around it that screams at me to wake up to the opportunities. But I’m stuck in some sort of weird dream that keeps perpetuating itself, and as a result everything I originally believe is an opportunity for romance and innocent love, I end up second guessing and making up excuses for myself so that I don’t have to jump, at least not off that certain cliff.

And we all know what happens after that. Pain. Gloom. Doom. We get together and write songs about it. It gives us a temporary reprieve, as our grief is replaced with a sense, however small, of achievement. We got it out. But imagine living our entire lives like that. Someone or something comes up, we feel it, and then we do all we can to invalidate our initial experience, and even label our discursive thoughts as our intuition. “I just have a gut feeling that her and I wouldn’t work out.” Even worse, we don’t investigate it at all. We just let it pass us by, and we probably don’t even reach out at the glass. And then we cry and write and have long conversation with our close ones about how ultimately intangible and unworkable this whole love thing is. Destiny tries again and again to throw us a lifeline, but just ends up beating its beautiful head against the wall.

Again, I don’t want to be like that. There must be some choice involved somewhere that I’ve set on autopilot.

Okay so, assuming I’m just writing on instinct here, a guess I have, about the whole love thing, is that we might do well from just flowing along a little more, and to stop pretending like we have so much to lose. Hell, we usually walk around like we’re carrying the Persian empire in our back pocket and we can’t hug anyone for fear that they’ll look over our shoulder and see it. Because, in reality, in the now, what do we have to lose? We are afraid of relationships because of what has happened in the past. But as our elastic bands of time continue to stretch out towards the inevitable snap, the distance between the bad breakups and what she did to me and the rest of the sad story, and the now, is also continually growing. By now it must be astronomical. I’ve seen all my ex- girlfriends in the past month and I honestly had a hard time recreating the pain and the drama all over again in my mind. They were just other people, really. I even went so far with one of them to notice a feeling inside me of disbelief, that I had held on to her so fervently long ago, because in present times I could never consider that with her. We had thought we would get married. C’est La Vie.

The problem with this kind of guess is that it’s not something I feel I can act upon, and this is where the other thing in the “couple of big things” up there comes into play. I’m leaving in little under a month, and I don’t know when I’m coming back. Now, I know that the whole trip is only just a concept in my mind at this point, and it will, as things often do, end up almost completely different from what I had imagined. So with that in mind, I’m trying my best to stay open to this thing, and in a broader sense, to life. Easier said than done, yeah yeah yeah. But the fact is, I will soon no longer be immersed in everything I have come to accept and view as homey and familiar, and will be deposited into an environment that offers the possibility of exactly the opposite. The chances that I have now, consciously and unconsciously, will soon evaporate. So I feel that I can’t really move on these things, as, what’s the point? I know I have an easy way out, and I’m taking it.

But is this going to set a dangerous precedent for the chances I’ll have in the future? Who knows who I’ll meet on my travels, and who knows what kind of excuses I’ll conjure up to convince myself she wouldn’t be worth it? It’s just sad. It’s slapping destiny in the face in my sleep.

So does this mean I should jump for every opportunity? I don’t know if I can answer that, so instead I’ll say that I really must pay more attention to the unconscious movements away from the unknown and the potentially dangerous, and also the hidden and equal potential for holding hands in a Parisian midsummer night. It’s just ridiculous how we expect that we know everything about a situation that hasn’t even happened yet. And also that we insist we have a whole empire to lose, and that it’s teetering on the edge of a ginormous cliff, and that she could be the one to tip the balance and make it all fall. Who knows…maybe, and not to be dramatic or anything, that’s just what I need. The beautiful romances that I’ve had have always been unplanned, off the cuff, and totally absent of any expectation. It’s odd that this is all coming together only just now, but I guess better late than never. I think it may be time to grow a set of balls, so to speak, learn to trust my first impressions, and then let her tip my heart off the cliff. After all, the alternative hasn’t exactly been working recently, so again, what have I got to lose? Famous last words, perhaps. But, in my opinion, honorable ones.