I keep coming back to this idea that love as we know it is silly, trite and majorly dead. There is such a silencing of love. It’s like we’re so desensitized to it. We can’t even think about it. To see it. To feel it. Yet we can feel that great aching gap within us.

In my experience people do one of two things. You will either run after affection, the manifestation of love. The symbols, the semiotic language, the signifiers, the gift, the ring, the full blown kiss. The small acts of kindness and worth that we are told make life worthwhile. Like time must be measured and judged, so by extension all else around you must be too.

Or..

You will accept the gaping hole. “Run from love” for want of a better phrase. As someone who seldom does this or fits this trajectory, it’s hard to write about it. My privilege is such. But please let me try if I can. These emotions are those “dark ones”, the ones we have all felt. But nastier. Ones who follow this path aren’t just running from love, no, they are assimilating the worst manifestations. You become a steadfast rock, a pragmatic, dark, harsh person. Internalising, moulding, battering love into some submission to “reality”. Neglecting, hurting, in short treating Love with such disdain it and you get an entire complex problem.

Now to be perfectly honest, I for one and most people I have observed tend to sway between the two. Some lucky people can even feel both categories of love and emotion at the same time. At this juncture, I don’t know perfectly what it is that needs to be conveyed or answered. My thoughts are still stuck on the fact that “Love” cannot be “love” as we know it. Even though we are so connected, even if I may have a million ways to contact the person I love. I still cannot and must not. I have been told and I have scolded myself many times. This is all so that I adhere to what is best for me. (I think).

Perhaps it should be self-love that I run behind. That is after all what all the literature, historic texts, songs and countless media tell me to do. Maybe it is my soul and my heart and my head that are out of sync. The “holy trinity” that exists within me is off kilter. And yet, somehow, I cannot shake the feeling, that deep socialist remnants, the Grecian* cartesian idea that the trinity exists in reality within a community. That it is not the internal soul, but that which exists surrounding the soul that needs to be fixed.

But what do we do, when the social, the society, the mirrored duo refuses to listen and you cannot say directly the knowledge you are picking up? How can you adequately be true to your own self, strong and yet patient in waiting for a mirrored action and sign? How long would that even be for?

Or is that yet another ‘level of reality’ as Hartmann would say? Another manifestation of some other Fate unfolding?

….I guess I must let the hands unfurl as they may.

(*much, much older than that though! Deeper in the world too. )