i suppose there's a certain sadness in me whenever i've "loved" someone who didn't love me back. of course, most of the time, i'd have to say i was more infatuated than in love. that is, it was a kind of love-from-a-distance thing. and perhaps i never really even wanted to be close to that person, because if that person ever did get close (i.e. reciprocate) then it would destroy the illusion i had of that person. it's funny; oftentimes, i would actually have this fantasy of dying for that person. it was an expression of this idea that, again, the existence of the infatuated person would cancel out my own existence...
this morphed into a lot of different compensations or versions. i read don quixote, and all that talk about chivalric love, and i'd laugh and think that it was so ridiculous. but in many ways, it was exactly what i did. i would long for people, but then have this certain giddy happiness at being "denied" (most of the time, no one even knew how i was feeling, btw). it was almost as though the infatuatee was in this separate heaven where everything was perfect and right, and i was in this purgatory just biding my time...
maybe i don't understand love at all. or at least, it's not love in the sense that others feel it.
i have always felt so thoroughly unworthy of love... maybe also respect. i have always felt so thoroughly despised. but again, maybe it was simply so i could remain a secret. an unknown factor. the hidden weapon.
i was never very close to people. but when i have been close, i.e. friendly, it has always felt dangerous. i'm not good at maintaining barriers, especially with people who have dared to enter my distant "gravity field," and for those that have been friendly to me (women that is), there was always the temptation to completely eclipse that distance... in my twisted head, that always meant intimacy (as if that actually solves anything).
nowadays, love is strange to me. i mean, not true love, the love that i feel for my wife, but that head-over-heels romantic type of love. even in fantasy, i don't believe it. or rather, it is so removed and incompatible with my present mindset that i can't even conceive of the possibility. i can't imagine a person who would ever express interest in me, at least not in a way that my defenses would not coopt. i think in many ways i'm impregnable. or completely dense.
as i get older, the possibility of "romance" (i.e., that trill and thrill) is ever more remote. i am an old man, and am happily, loyally married. and no one would be interested, no one could be interested in me. so...
love, the romantic sort of love, is only in memories, and even in memories, only existing as some kind of hollow echo; an unfulfilled promise.
well, i don't know what else to say on this topic...
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