10

Up until this point I have been using the ambiguous pronoun "he" to identify the subject of the vast majority of these posts. This perhaps indicates the irony of the break-up. But now I am about the entertain discussion of other individuals who would also fall under the pronoun heading of "he" but such ambiguity, though employed to conceal identity, would become too confusing. So, casual reader, bear with me while I attempt to create another system of naming. I will also cast aside the fact that the nature of this blog seems to revolve around the male sex, casting me in the part of self-absorbed romance blogger in manner of Carrie Bradshaw - something I cannot be proud of despite its veracity. But I digress. First I must name this new mysterious gentleman before I can commit him to these virtual pages for better or for worse.

In just a few months I have come to be aquatinted with a number of new young men to fill the void. There was "Never-Been-Kissed", "The Snapping Turtle", "The Brazilian", "The Freshman", "Michael Cera", among others. The one I will embark on discussion requires a name of his own but an appropriate one remains elusive. I was told by one of his friends that, with him, what you see is what you get. Perhaps this is true and yet I still find something enigmatic about him, one of his better qualities in my opinion. Technically, he would be called my classmate. I became infatuated with his forearms and the red piece of thread that clings delicately to his pale wrist. As the only male within a respectable age range coupled with his runway worthy good looks, it seemed like only a matter of time.

Who he is and what he does are not relevant for now. But right now, I am preoccupied with how he feels in two senses. The first is the classic sense of the term. I am interested in his thoughts and his emotions; both of which I am not given the privilege to know. The second, what he feels like to me. He feels like the cool senior in high school that noticed you after you grew breasts and took you to the backseat of his car for a test drive. And you, still too laden with pubescent lack of confidence to realize how you became worthy, find yourself staring at some innocuous detail in the car's interior thinking why you? Why now? How long will this last and how will this end? You know how the story usually ends and you begin to wait for the day to come when you climb out of the passenger seat with your hair all mussed, he gives you that last flash of a smile before you shut the door and watch the tail lights trail off into memory. If you know how the story ends then you think know how to write the plot when life inevitably creates its own and ruins everything but you cannot know that yet.

A new story has begun and our heroine is already in peril of infatuation.

9

People always seem to know what true love truly is. Whether it is because they have witnessed it or felt it, they all have an opinion. I, too, have my own opinion but it is because I recognize what I was lacking rather than what I actually possessed. I truly believed it was true love until it was gone and the speed at which it left me indicated that it was just a clever ruse my ego had designed. A philosopher, whose canon of unending wisdom I try to appropriate into my life, defined this as the common delusion the vast majority of us suffer: one falls in love with the image of a person our ego has projected onto them, blowing them up to an idea of who they are -- and idea they can never possibly attain simple because they exist in the realm of reality. Thus, when confronted with the fact that one has fallen in love with an idealized form, one is immediately disappointed and love dies swiftly. We are all Narcissus, falling for our own reflection in another only to be rudely awaked from this dream when we fall headlong into the frigid waters when we dive in for a kiss. Then we drown in reality and die alone.

People argue incessantly about love. Whether we are designed for it. Whether or not a one true love can exist. Whether abusing the word cheapens the meaning. What the depths of love are and whether there is a limit. And yet, language is so limiting that we can only devise synonyms for a single word that has prismatic meaning and feeling. All the patronizing couples will smile kindly and say that one will know love when they see it. I thought I had and I would have bet against my life upon it. I am only too thankful that I did not. We fell in love with what the other represented. I was the quintessential trophy- possessing me meant doing everything correctly in order to earn me. I meant success. He was a white picket fence and kitschy Christmas cards- being possessed by him equated to the happiness of smiling faces in aging photographs and advertisements. He meant comfort. We both fell in love with a symbol, a dream.

I define myself as a romantic and will forever be trapped in those teenage fantasies of obsession. I play make believe seeking something that burns hot for eternity, forgetting entirely of the laws of nature and the impossibility of such a phenomenon. But this obsession is purely ego that lies about reciprocity. I want to be the center of someone's universe and I want them to tell me so. I want to hear my name. I want to see my reflection in the glint of someone's eyes. I want to know what makes me so great. Only then can I reciprocate obsession for obsession. But this is not love. This is quintessential narcissism, elitism, sadism and inevitably masochism. This is destruction. Thus, I present my own ill-informed conjecture on the subject of true love: love is selflessness in the purest of forms. When one truly could willingly give up everything for the sake of another and not for the sake of saying so. It is not the selfish martyrdom so many seek in hopes of winning moral glory. It is no sacrifice for sacrifice denotes losing something while the gain remains limited to the ego whereas selflessness seeks no gain and loses nothing in the process. This, I imagine, is what true love must be like and thus it must exist in the farthest realm of possibility known to the human spectrum of emotion.

8

I feel as though I have lived a number of lifetimes already and the memories I have are from past lives that I am not meant to remember. These memories do not feel as though they belong to me. It is as if I read these stories in a book or saw them on a movie screen and incorporated them into my subconscious only the be replayed in my sleep. Each era of my life falls away into a deeper, darker and dustier corner of the library in my mind as it stretches to make room for new chapters within new volumes. I have evidence of these memories everywhere: on my skin, in my eyes, in my dreams, on my walls - everywhere... but they feel more like trinkets someone left behind when they moved away which I had accidentally discovered when I moved in. The people I knew once upon a time in a far away place - they still exist. They still breathe and eat and love and smile and cry . But, in truth, they are like characters in a novel I knew intimately for 250 pages or a for 120 minutes in a theater somewhere. And these flickering moments in which we were together pass by once in a while as a montage and I have to stop and determine if it really happened.

I asked myself when I shut his book and stored it on the shelf whether he would incur the same fate as the rest; whether or not the anger would grow stale after the love went rancid. I wondered how long before the pages would turn yellow and brittle. When would I open it back up to reference a moment in time and would I hear the binding crack from age? How often would I pass him by pretending to ignore it before I would ultimately forget him and he would be relegated to fiction. After spending years dedicating this work to him, I do not think I can recall the ring of his laugh or the tone of his voice. Slowly, I begin to forget why. After why goes how. After how goes, what and when depart together. Who, however, takes the longest to shake from memory. Even if the details are obscured by time, a blurred image will always be able to sustain itself in memory as emblematic of someone somewhere some time ago with which something happened. But the hot coal of wrath lingers long enough within, casting terrible shadows on a face I thought I knew so well. Eventually, it will be like ancient countries warring over a blood feud long since forgotten but the passion and the anger remains even if the reason is made irrelevant with the passage of time.