untitled #2
Well I heard a tale that the Good Lord gives and he takes. Speaks in fires and earthquakes. And I have all these terrible things in my head. Wonder what he thinks about them. - Dijon, God In Wilson
Like many my age, I grew up with screens that recounted tales of love. It was fed to me and I sought it. The earliest film I could remember calling my favorite was Disney’s 1937 version of Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs. I was 5 years old going to sleep in my grandmother’s bed, arms crossed over my chest wishing for a prince to kiss me awake in the morning and save me. From what? I don’t know. The perils of pre-k?
As I grew older, the motif of love never left me. I dreamed about it, I yearned for it. It was imbued in everything around me. As a preteen, I played computer games and I was enamored by the presence of relationships on them. I had friends with boyfriends, guild mates with wives and the server-wide blasts of partners announcing their devotion to their lovers intermittently peppered my monster hunting. I wrote a brief bit about it in my previous publication, but needless to say I was fixated on love. It was as natural as breathing. Well…being that I struggled to breathe sometimes as a kid, I would say it was more natural than that.
In nearly the 10 years I’ve spent consuming love posts on Tumblr, I’ve never come across one that told a plain tale. They were always eccentric, bigger than life, and something to aspire. From 16, I was told that was how love would be. It was so omnipresent, it became a promise. When you fall in love, it will course through you. You will never have a dull moment. Every day you look into your partners eyes, you’ll feel the same sensations as you did on Day 0. And while I can’t stand here and claim those may not be someone’s truths, they weren’t my truths.
Like the discourse around participation trophies claims, when you’re raised being told you’re extraordinary, it’s a rude awakening when you find someone extra-extraordinary or realize you’re just ordinary. Though there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, it demands one to reconstruct their beliefs and not everyone desires to do so on a random Wednesday afternoon. But with love, that was how it was for me. After the ticking off the check boxes i created in my teens, there was “nothing” left. It just was. And with every scroll on Tumblr, I was told that the normalcy and mundane was wrong. There had to be a spark, always. There had to be fireworks, even if you’re running on empty and the car’s already stopped moving. I wasn’t prepared for the reality of loving someone because my participation in the love economy* required my belief in the unrealistic. How else would I be marketed to?
Likewise, the ending of love was always orchestrated with much fanfare. It was loud shouts and slammed doors. Affairs and abuse, destruction and disregard. But nobody told me how the end could be as quiet as two people loving each other and it just not working out.
I think the simplicity of it is what hurts the most. The waking up to nausea and a stomach in coils. The looking and searching to find what once kept you pulled in but coming up short. The begging for the stars to shift and activate something cosmic. Their unrelentingness to do so.
It’s not falling out of love. But realizing you love the other too much to continue like this. That showing up to the table or slipping into bed with a belly full of uncertainty and a mind that can’t be made up is no way to be with someone you love. I keep doing the impossible, trying to figure out which moment I could’ve poked into place. I refuse to accept the simple possibility that it could have always ended this way. A lesson would always be just that. Destiny doesn’t change with just one prayer.
I want a way forward that doesn’t pack dirt over the casket and lay sod over it.
I want a maintained headstone and the grass pulled up.
I want the vase fill with water and no trash to be around.
And while we’re at it, let’s add a pillow or two.
I want to be comfy when I pay my respects to what once was and tell it the tale of how it made me.
* by love economy, i mean capitalism and profitability of marketing love. quite literally the economy surrounding love.