Love and its oddities
I did not adhere to any plans I made in 2021. I have worked out once in all the 39 days of this year, I have not a clue about my semester syllabus, let alone starting work on it and I have been as disconnected from the world around me as ever. But somehow, amidst this pompous failure to reach my goals, I don’t have an iota of shame or regret.
Living in this social loop of responsibilities and imposed discipline has really rocked my boat of desires. Now all that I desire is to demolish this social loop that binds me. So, unconsciously, I do the exact opposite of everything that I am ought to do. I hear my mother’s constant badgering and complaints as I flout all sense of decorum and I just fucking sleep on it.
I have been trying to hold myself back from falling in love but I fell right into this mushy and temperate trap of mollycoddling and nauseatingly puerile name calling. I landed myself right where I was hoping not to be: in the warm onset of a relationship where you are just glad to not be alone, covering up the inherently perpetual emptiness with “I have someone.”
And this feeling of having someone ought to suffice, right? It is a lot like taking yourself out on a date. You put on your best attire and kick your feet off with your choicest pair of heels and carefully blow-dried hair with a cut off time of 2 hours to look its best. You sweep yourself off your feet and plonk yourself down at the corner table for one, with a remarkable garden view outside. But as you take your first bite into the beautifully adorned platter of sushi, you realize it is squawking cold and undercooked, but then again, isn’t that how sushi is supposed to be? Do you even like sushi or is the thought of a ridiculously expensive dinner sufficient to entice you? Either way, you are satisfied with this rendezvous with yourself. You took yourself out on a fine date and that counts as self-care, notwithstanding the fact that you will inevitably have to go back hungry to your damp studio apartment, hunting for any remainders of last night’s dinner. It is similar: falling in love with someone else and falling in love with yourself, it is never enough.
So, here I am, in love again. Although my eyes ache from all the texting in the darkness, my heart finds a way to leap around my body in elation. And well, I have always been the kind to choose my heart over… other important organs of the body. But you know, you can be not alone but awfully lonely still. And as long as there is no remedy for that, just the thought of “having someone” ought to suffice.
So, what could help you from this clamorous loneliness may just be a phantom sense of company, until you fall back down again. But in all honesty, I don’t mind the falling down and getting up ritual, although I do enjoy the literal experiences of it, instead of the figurative ones. Because, my chafed knees would probably act as a kind reminder that there will always be a world out there that’s waiting to batter me down. So, when I feel my lowest in the cozy canopy of my blanket, I could always give my wounded knee a quick squeeze to remind myself of the world of pain that will always await me, in company or not.