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ohitsjustfee · 6 years

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Lovely

I have never liked the phrase “I love you more and more each day.” It’s so unrealistic and selfish of me to be bothered by this phrase, but I am. I can’t help it. I have to be honest with myself. I feel like this phrase implies that love is fluid, and that love can be added and subtracted. One could argue that it’s a cold fact that love can wane, but I hate it. I hate that fact with a burning passion.

I want love to be an indestructible part of us all.

“I love you fully.” When I love, it feels at full capacity. The person becomes the center of my world. I have my own interests and identity, don’t get me wrong, but I have no shame in holding someone above myself. I don’t feel like I’m betraying my gender by cleaning up after someone. To me, it is all a part of making love. I make love to a man when I hold the screen door open so he can more easily unlock it and let us in. I make love to a man when I fix his cup of coffee in the morning. I make love to a man when I order him pizza, and scratch his back because I suck at massages.

When it comes to romanticism my perfectionism can be my downfall. I know more than anyone that I am flawed. I have an addictive personality. I have an anxiety disorder. Sometimes I go through depression spells so severe that I feel like running into traffic. Sometimes I wake up from nightmares having just vividly seen some of the most gruesome and horrifying imagery a subconscious could conceive of. I have to continuously remind myself that I am worthy of love, or I will sabotage it. It’s taken me many years to learn to stop sabotaging love, and it will likely remain a work in progress.

Philosopher Alain de Botton has stated that the worst thing you can do to someone you love is show them your full self. We expect too much from partners. He believes that romanticism is a new age concept. Marriage used to be something that was a matter of convenience, child rearing, a pragmatic partnership. For sexual fun there were mistresses. For regular fun there were hobbies. Now we expect our partners to be completely sexually fulfilling, have and raise our children, maintain finances with us, keep their areas clean, and be our greatest confidant. That’s a lot. Alain argues it’s too much. He argues that the romantic period ruined us, in a sense. We expect too much from each other.

As smart as Alain is, I’m going to have to disagree with him on romance not being an innate part of human nature. I have always been fascinated by ancient graffiti, and that is all you really need to turn to to prove his theory invalid. Scribbled across the wall of the preserved-by-tragedy Pompeii is a phrase, written 2,097 years ago, that translates to “If you are able, but not willing, why do you put off our joy and kindle hope and tell me always to come back tomorrow? So, force me to die since you force me to live without you. Your gift will be to stop torturing me. Certainly, hope returns to the lover what it has once snatched away.”

All heart broken people are poets, and to romanticize is to be human. There was no romantic period that corrupted us. We simply have reached the comfortable place on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs where we can enjoy it. We don’t need cold and pragmatic partnerships. As long as we have food in our stomachs and medicine in our cabinets we can chase this whole love thing. We can spend years yearning for it, dissecting it, philosophizing about it, and beating ourselves up over it.

I have always been a Tina Belcher type character. I don’t remember a time where I wasn’t fantasizing about love or dwelling on it. I would walk home from school my freshman year of high school and take a break on this bench along my trek. I’d sit there and think about my first boyfriend, turned first ex-boyfriend. I’d wonder where his love for me went, and how it was even possible for love to die. My passion for him died a slow, slow painful death whereas he seemed to move on with ease. I put him on a pedestal I thought I’d never be able to remove him from.

A few weeks ago I decorated cookies with his step son, my nephew’s best friend. Life is truly funny.

I guess that explains it all. I saw a man’s passion for me die very early in my life, and now I can’t stand the concept. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to be a dramatic little twat about it. If a man were to tell me he loves me “more and more each day” I’d take it as it was intended, to be high praise, but in the pit of my stomach I would feel this pang. For when I love, I love fully, and I have the privilege of being a spoiled little poet about it. Romanticism. It’s innate within all of us isn’t it?

My passion for passion has caused me great harm in my life, but I can’t imagine a life without it. It has almost killed me, but it also has made me feel more alive than I’ve ever felt before. My first kiss was skillfully awful, but it sent me home on a cloud of sunbeams. I didn’t feel my feet as I moved, I floated. I laid in bed at night and felt the electricity shoot through my body as I re-imagined his kiss on the corner of my mouth. I still to this day think about laughing with my ex-girlfriend as her tiny Asian ass picked me up and held me like a baby. I think about her putting her cold foot on my stomach and how we would fall over laughing constantly. I think about how beautiful she looked when the wind whipped her hair, and those long skirts she used to wear.

I think about when this lovely man kissed me, and the shock I felt at a man’s lips being so soft. I think about when I was with a terribly unlovely man, but was so in love that I wanted to scream it from the mountain tops. I think about love.

I’ve had the great privilege and horror of being built, broken, and remolded again and again by love. I need it to stop being this fluid thing. I need it to be set in stone that I love a person, and that person loves me, fully, lest I go insane from it and bore you all with pretentious poetry (let’s be honest, I probably will anyway.)

This was a heavy post, so I’m going to leave this on a lighter note. This is one of my favorite pieces of graffiti from the ancient ruins of Pompeii, left on the wall of a brothel: “ Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men's behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity! “

We’ve always been clowns. Lovely, loving, romantic, poetry writing clowns. And we always will be.

I’m sorry I haven’t been streaming lately. I’ve been overloaded with work as the holidays draw near, and suffered a depression spell a few weeks ago that left me sort of wanting to isolate for a bit. I hope to stream today (Sunday). If I am not graced with your company, I want to wish you the happiest of holidays in advance. I’ll ramble at your sassy asses later.

“Do you recall it's name As it suggested beck and call? This face and heel Will drag your halo through the mud Ash of Pompeii Erupting in a statues dust Shrouded in veils Because these handcuffs hurt too much “ - Cicatriz Esp, The Mars Volta

#love #pompeii #ancientgraffiti #romanticism #philosophy #alaindebotton

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