Love, on its worst behavior

I think it takes a great deal of illusion to write confidently about love. More than that, I feel as if I need permission to. I don’t know from whom, but I need it…the permission, more than the forgiveness for having failed so badly at it, for wanting it, despite everything, for writing about it, even after my own crushing failure.

And for all my impassioned descriptions on what I believe love should be, I’ve got nothing to show for it. At a time when many of my friends are in the first chapters of their love stories, mine is just ending. Or, more honestly, it ended long time ago. And love, in my life, is like an author after his first novel; either he’s run out of ideas or he’s scared of destroying his success from the first one. In both cases, the writer’s hand is stagnant and stubborn, just like the author of love in my life, except the first novel was a disaster, and instead of fearing my success from the first attempt I fear, instead, adding to the failure of the first trial.

But the possibility of there being no more trials at love, and, even more frightening, no possibility of anything lasting is even more terrifying, and I find myself wishing my life was rather short and quick instead of enduring the exhausting and deeply unsatisfying search for it. Solitude already prolongs every hour, every day. Imagine a lifetime of it. And yes, there are different kinds of love, and the romantic kind seems the hardest to come by and the most unpredictable. But nothing, I believe, supplements romantic love. There’s a hole in me, and maybe many others, that can only be answered with a very particular kind of love. The others are nourishing, exciting, necessary even, but nothing like being held in the middle of the night, being spoken to in a tone reserved only for you, being looked at it in a way…it’s a way I can’t really describe but it’s the sort of look that makes you feel like maybe God went through all this effort just so that the two of you could end up in a room someplace together. I’ve almost forgotten what it looks like, or how it feels, but I can remember it vaguely… a pair of beautiful brown eyes finding me from across the room, pausing over me as if I was the verse he needed to carry him through a poem he’s been fighting through for days. Except he wasn’t a writer and I was just that, a verse, nothing more…just something he passed through, the end inevitable and near, always near.

But I don’t think one has to be fulfilled romantically to write honestly about love. In fact, I think it's the un-fullfilment, the constant yearning, the imaginations that are always kinder on the mind that gives birth to vivid and wild narratives on love. I’ve always been curious about the love lives of the most romantic authors, artists, filmmakers. I’d look through and explore deeply what I probably should have left to that imagination, and I almost always emerged disappointed.

In Cunningham’s short story, written from the perspective of a love fairy, he says:

“I see I was right to end the affair before it started. I feel sure the poem and the song wouldn’t have been written if he’d put his hand over hers on that long-ago afternoon and she’d answered with a kiss, if they’d had time to reach the irritations and disappointments — the finger taps on the tabletop, the laundry piles, the uneasy silences — that are inevitable in our lives but may not be all that helpful where certain love poems are concerned. I told him to choose the poem about the woman over the woman herself…I have no second thoughts, hardly any, about turning the poet away from the woman while she was still a poem to him.”

— “What We Did for Love” by Michael Cunningham

In my Mind

In the end, we never love the way we intend to, but I love the lover that lives in my mind. She’s a dreamy-eyed woman with unruly hair, tanned skin, roaming the corridors in a long bohemian dress. Her carelessness is beautiful. Her disregard for the opinions of others, total and true. She is a train and not the terminal that I am, waiting, always waiting, incompetent without the presence of others. The lover in my mind, like me, never finishes anything, but unlike me, doesn’t mind, isn’t tortured by it. Her life is hers and not her lover’s and still she loves him. She is not unfinished without him, though maybe there’s something in her that can only be answered with him. Art and love occupy equal spaces; neither is compromised or crushed for the sake of the other. There is harmony and not the battle that took place instead. I was, in reality, always in bed, always dreaming, but at war, with him, with myself. It was a self-made war, one I thought all romantic lives needed, and I drove myself mad with the belief that either I’d be a girl who does little and is loved a lot or I’d be a woman artist who does too much and is loved too little.

It makes no sense, but it’s what I believed. I received what I needed and in receiving, I was tortured by guilt. The wanting is familiar and though agonizing, it’s easier to bare than the guilt I otherwise have to carry. When I am miserably in need of love, I’ve nothing to apologize for. And it’s my fault—that I believe I’m in the custody of a God that prefers and sanctifies my suffering and loses his temper when I replace that suffering with the pleasures of love. It could be that because my guardians were like that, kind with me through my suffering, uneasy when I was feminine and wild and happy that I believe God is like that too. I think we find our ideas of God in the ones who raise us, and however they are, we believe God is too. I’ve seldom come across someone who had punishing, cruel parents and didn’t think the same of God, or ones who were raised by people who were loving and compassionate and thought similarly of God. And it’s incredibly hard, maybe even impossible, to sever the two.

Because of my beliefs, I feel as if I can only truly be loved by one, God or man. Somedays, it feels as if I’m hated by both, and I feel neither pretty enough for a man nor holy enough for God.

But what really consumes me is the way I see others love, more than the feeling I have that there seems to be so little of it. I am bored with our civilized, well-mannered, mild-tampered ways of loving, and courting. In the brief period I’ve tried dating, I realized it would almost always have to be one person feigning indifference, the other on the verge of begging. I hated it. And then, the interludes in between, when it’s all in the air and so precarious, and the chance for love or not hangs on one word, perfect timing, pretty departures and promising ways of saying goodbye at the end of a date. It’s all so delicate, the game that is, not love. I think love’s just as bored and frustrated with it all as I am.

“Love can be that fragile, in its earliest stages. Love can be the train you miss by less than a minute. Love can be the wrongly meaningful typo spell-check puts into your text.

— “What We Did for Love” by Michael Cunningham

Dirty Love

And while we’re on the subject of love, I wanted to write honestly about sex, not in a sensual way but in a way where I imagine I am a child with no sense of right or wrong, sin and holiness, hell and heaven, and I am asking what is about sex that is so dangerous and awful? Really, it’s as simple and as innocent of a question as that, what really makes it so dirty, so scary, so worthy of punishment and God’s anger? The other day, I caught myself thinking about it, and I remember telling myself to stop with those dirty thoughts but then, for the very first time in my life, I looked up at the grass and the sun and the summer air and I asked myself, why is it a dirty thought? What’s dirty about it? I want to ask, and keep asking, until my questions pull me out of 25 years of shame and guilt and all those teachings and warnings about sexuality and sensuality and femininity and how dangerous and upsetting to God it is.

Deep down, I think all these things are beautiful, I really do. But then my grandpa’s eyes make their through my thoughts and I see myself again, the way he saw me when I was coming of age, how disgusting he thought my body was, how badly he wanted it covered, how he’d watch me, his lips bent downwards, his eyes full of rage as I passed him. And all the girls at school who’d call me a slut because of the way my body shaped itself, or, how God chose to shape it. And because there was hardly any love for me in the family, I learned very early on that I could find the attention I needed by dressing a certain way. And like that, I was getting all that I craved for, except I didn’t know there were different kinds of attention and kinds of love and some were good and some were harmful. I didn’t have categories for what I needed, the same way someone who’s mad with hunger isn’t picky about what they eat, so long as they do. I took whatever was offered to me and never considered whether it was good or bad for me. I took what came and I took it quick, because I was always unsure there’d be more of it later, or that I’d ever be wanted again, by somebody else, perhaps kinder, more loving, more suitable. I could not afford to be picky, not when I was the hungriest I’d ever been. And now, after all that I’d been through, I try to do better, to be more patient, to study the men I come across from afar, not because I am any less hungry, but because my heart cannot afford to suffer through another heartbreak.