neekaisweird:

Sometimes when you think you love something what you really love is not the thing itself but just some small and inessential part of it: you think you love banana splits but really you just love the maraschino cherry on top and you think you love autumn but really you just love getting a Pumpkin Spice Latte at Starbucks and you think you love Shrek but really you just love that montage near the end after Shrek and Fiona have their falling out when he’s sitting in his swamp all alone and she’s getting ready for her wedding and Rufus Wainwright’s cover of “Hallelujah” is playing in the background, and you think you’re in love with him but really you’re just in love with the smile that pops onto his face when he spots you in the Think Coffee near Washington Square Park, in love with the way it makes you feel to see someone look at you like that, look at you like you’re the only real thing in the entire world, even though he only looks at you like that because he just moved to the city a month ago and doesn’t know anyone and because he saw you on the subway reading the same book that he was reading, which made him think of a New Yorker cover by Adrian Tomine that he once saw when he was in high school, except on the New Yorker cover the boy and the girl were on different trains, and when he saw you reading the same book that he was reading he thought “Here’s my chance to make it right” as if the boy and the girl on the New Yorker cover were real people, since in high school he liked thinking of himself as the sort of person who thinks of fictional characters (especially tortured young men like Hamlet and Raskolnikov and Stephen Dedalus) as real people and never quite got out of that habit, just like he never quite got out of the habit of fantasizing about his middle-school crush or the habit of starting up a multiplayer game in a first-person shooter just to wander around the level all alone or the habit of coming downstairs in his pajamas on Christmas and sitting cross-legged on the floor opening his presents and smiling involuntarily because “Santa” brought him just what he wanted or the habit of sometimes waking up in the middle of the night with a nameless fear lodged in his heart and crying out, in the quietest whisper, for his mother, and because since moving to the city he’d started feeling that fear even in broad daylight when he saw an ambiguity on the subway map that might make him late for work or an abandoned shopping cart filled with dirty plastic bags or when he thought about how maybe this morning he left his apartment door unlocked or maybe today he’ll be talking with someone and they’ll bring up a movie he’s never seen or maybe someone is mad at him for doing something he doesn’t even remember doing, but really feeling that fear all the time and just being reminded of it at certain moments, reminded that it had become his default state, not a fear of something so much as a fear of the lack of something that he felt in the center of his stomach as if there were no center there at all, as if he were built around nothing but an emptiness and had to exert a constant effort just to keep from collapsing inward like a black hole, and he would lie awake at night feeling the emptiness gurgle up and down inside him and sometimes feeling what he thought were the inside surfaces of his stomach rubbing against one another and saying “ouch, ouch, ouch” and twisting his face like he would cry when stomach acid refluxed into the lower part of his esophagus and sometimes being afraid that he had stomach cancer but then seeing you reading the same book that he was reading on the subway that he hadn’t yet realized was the wrong subway, which he got on because of an ambiguity on the subway map, seeing you reading the same book that he was reading and thinking of that New Yorker cover and thinking “Here’s my chance to make it right” except he didn’t realize he was thinking either of those thoughts but thought he was just thinking “I’m going to go talk to that girl” and then getting up from his seat and walking over to you and saying “Hey is that a good book?” and laughing and not feeling embarrassed at all even though he knew the other people on the train would see what he was doing, and seeing you nod and laugh and thinking about how the two of you already had an inside joke, and then seeing that he’d gotten on the wrong train and would be late for work because the train had gone past his stop and the stop after and kept going and going and going, which was exactly what he’d been afraid of when he saw that ambiguity on the subway map and now the thing he’d been afraid of was happening, except now that it was happening he wasn’t afraid at all because on the wrong train he found a girl who was reading the same book that he was reading and went up to her and talked to her and made her laugh and they already had their little inside joke together and they were already talking about where they lived and where they were from and what they did and when the train stopped at 125^th St. he said he had to get off and go back downtown but did she want to grab coffee sometime and she said yes that would be great and he said okay how about six o’clock tomorrow at the Think Coffee near Washington Square Park and she said that sounds great and he said okay see you then and walked away feeling better than he had ever felt in his entire life because he’d been in the city for a month and hadn’t made a single friend and had spent every night just drinking alone and watching porn and masturbating over and over and over until it hurt to come as if there was something inside of him that he was trying to get rid of except that thing was not something but the lack of something but now all of a sudden there was another human being in his life and life was going to be okay after all, life was going to be better than okay, life was going to be everything he ever imagined it would be, except betterbecause it was going to be not imaginary but real, after all these years of living out his life in fantasies it was finally going to be real, and he spent the next day and a half not thinking any thoughts except “IT’S GOING TO BE REAL IT’S GOING TO BE REAL IT’S GOING TO BE REAL” over and over and over until six o’clock the next day when he walks into Think Coffee and looks around and then sees you and thinks “IT’S REAL” and the thought registers on his face as a smile, a smile that says, with absolute clarity, “You are the only real thing in the entire world,” and that smile — not him, but that smile — is what you’re really in love with, and you think you love Jameson but really you just love that time when you were home for winter break your freshman year of college and your dad poured you a glass of it like it was no big deal, like it was something he did all the time, even though it was the first time your parents had ever given you alcohol, and you sat on the couch by the fire and drank it and it burned but you’d already been in college for a semester and you were getting used to the burn of alcohol, even getting to like it, and you liked thinking of yourself as the sort of girl who likes whiskey, and you sat by the fire and listened to your dad read “’Twas The Night Before Christmas” out loud and drank just enough, just enough to feel like every cell in your body was buzzing with happiness, and later when the fire had turned to embers you and your parents watched The Snowmanon VHS and you were still feeling just drunk enough that during the “We’re Walking In The Air” part, for the first time in maybe eight years, or at any rate for the first time since whenever it was that you turned into a surly teenager and started wearing dark lipstick and hating your parents, you lay your head on your mom’s shoulder and you didn’t feel embarrassed at all when she put her arm around you and kissed your head and didn’t even feel embarrassed when you cried a little bit into her hair at the end of the movie and she stroked your hair and rocked you back and forth just a little bit and maybe even said “shhh” really quietly and kissed your head again and you just let her do it because you didn’t feel embarrassed at all because you were just drunk enough, just drunk enough to feel, for just one night, like a child, and you think you love Animal Collective but really you just love that one moment in “In The Flowers” when the beat rises up out of the swirl of noise and Avey Tare sings “Then we could be dancing, no more missing you while I’m gone” and you feel like oh my god I’ve been waiting for this my whole life, which is why you play Merriweather Post Pavilion right after sending the boy you met on the subway, the one who was reading the same book you were reading, the last text you will ever send him, and why you wonder why it isn’t making you feel any better.

neekaisweird:

In this moment, I’m not sure what I feel for you. I’ve been raised in a society that both exalts love and fears it. A society that tells me love is rare and experienced only under particular circumstances; beginning with family and radiating outward to long term relationships and close, time-worn friendships. To love too quickly is deemed foolish. To love too many, is superficial. Our tragedy is that we believe something can only be beautiful when it is rare. We exist in a society that dismisses the beauty in everyday life. We overlook the small, fleeting moments that make up our day, because we’ve become jaded to the heaviness of a cat sleeping on our lap; the warmth of someone else’s fingers filling the space between our own.

My father once told me in a hushed voice, that the only woman he ever said “I love you” to was my mother. He told me to be cautious with whom I spoke those words to. I always felt there was something wrong with me; that I didn’t comprehend the immensity of love. I felt it so easily for the friend curled up beside me in bed the morning after whispered conversation, for the young man with whom I shared a cup of coffee with each day for a year. Sometimes it’s okay to abandon caution and open yourself up to the possibility of a connection with another human being. It’s okay to be vulnerable. We were born with an incredible capacity for love. The quiet woman on the subway could be the person who gives you a new perspective on life—the one who opens you up with tremendous ease and assuages your fears and puts out your fires.

The English language doesn’t contain the vocabulary to express different levels of love—instead using one abstract word to encompass the entire complicated spectrum of human emotion. In Spanish, love between family is separated from love between spouses. In Greek, there are four distinct terms, each with its own meaning. Working with such a limited capacity for expression, it’s no wonder our society as a whole appears to perpetually be in turmoil over the concept of love. We’re in constant pursuit of it, yet question it when we experience it; herald it’s beauty, yet fear that we will be left broken in its wake. Love becomes a contradiction. It simultaneously becomes the root of our joys and our woes.

If there were a dictionary dedicated to all the variations and subtle nuances of love, perhaps I wouldn’t feel so conflicted when I look at you. You, sprawled out on my living room couch as dawn comes in under the blinds and I allow time to pass before interrupting your sleep. We aren’t rare. We exist in the category of everyday things; friends driving slowly on a Saturday afternoon, or two people holding on to each other in an airport. These things happen in high frequency, but it is in these moments, halfway between your start point and your destination in that car on that Saturday afternoon, when you look over and realize that you feel love for the person sitting next to you. Because the beautiful things in our life aren’t always rare or extraordinary.

Sometimes it’s the quiet seconds before dawn when everyone else is dreaming and you feel as if time has stopped momentarily. The moments that pass quietly and unnoticed are what you’ll remember most as you age and begin to collect memories like dead flowers pressed between the pages of a book.

There will be no fireworks or music swelling in the background. Love, as defined by every romance film in the past decade, is not going to occur; and that’s okay. I will wake you up and offer you something to eat. Breakfast will be ordinary. Despite what society says, what my father says, what the black and white printed definition in any dictionary says, in this fleeting, beautiful, simple, quiet moment, I know what I feel for you.

Once, you were a newborn: the swell and fall of your chest dictating the quality of someone else’s life, your tiny new fingers turning everything they touched to gold. You needed help doing just about everything, drinking and burping and sleeping, that’s who you used to be. Once, all you had to do to make someone’s day was open your eyes.

It feels like you’ve been waiting forever. You’re idle and you’re impatient, tapping toes and pushing buttons and waiting for a door to open and when it does, when it opens, you smile and you get in and you go for a ride.

I chose this place because it’s familiar. See that two-person table? That’s where I sat the first time I came here, opposite someone I thought would eventually fall in love with me. I ordered the pulled pork and grits. Two years later, I shared the same table with another guy; one I thought wouldstay in love with me. The menu had changed, by then. Steak and eggs that time. And over there, by the window? My parents and I, we sat there on my birthday. I drank three Bloodys as my mom looked on in dismay, right before she joined in.

English is so bad at describing what it means to grieve. We use words like bereft or bitter or sad, or we say we have a broken heart. But none of these really get at the nuances. The words don’t seem to capture each exquisitely painful feeling.