in love with love

once, while sitting around at this table in biology class, across from one socialite girl from my class, who was talking to one muscle bound (or so he thought, in his black tank top) upperclassman dude, a statement kind of struck me as odd. the girl said, "oh yeah, well, you know, he's the kind of guy who's in love with love."

what the hell did that mean?

at first, it seemed to me just another pretentious statement from someone who was in the "in crowd," who believed her feelings were dead on accurate statements of social reality (actually, the way things went, they probably were, in the sense that they made reality). it seemed like just another swoosh statement to go right over my (nerdling) head.

but then, maybe it didn't go over my head. maybe it was more like an inadvertent arrow that struck me dead in the chest. was i "the kind of guy who was in love with love?" meaning: did i really love the girl, or was it just the whole drama around the PROCESS that i loved?

now that i think about it (decades later), maybe i WAS in love with love. but the drama that i wrote around the process was NEVER a romance, or even a comedy. it was always fundamentally and desperately TRAGIC.

maybe, just maybe, i was in love with SADNESS instead. the sad and abused loner, the only one who did the right thing, and thus could never "get any." i still feel a twinge of resonance with that sentiment. i still believe FUNDAMENTALLY that the way "love" is set up nowadays (and from the very very beginning), being just and fair and kind has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with being loved or in love.

there's a quote that really really struck me when i first read it, by haruki murakami:

"Fairness is a concept that only applies in limited situations. Yet we want that concept to apply to everything, in and out of phase. From snails to hardware stores to married life. Maybe no one finds it, or even misses it, but fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek. [or deserve, my addition]" -from hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world