09.22.2010

Love makes you soft. It's the first thing it does. One moment you're steeling yourself against the harshness of the world, ready to face it with little else apart from your own limbs; the next thing you know, you're looking up from a book you're reading and then, there's a girl.


For some people, it's easy -- this bit about lowering defenses. I've had a bit of practice with that. I shed my toughie street cred sometime late high school and tried in vain to regain it with cigs early college. I failed; everybody knows how I'm actually all too soft on the inside. (Do not believe what my too-large elephant jeans and wrinkled rubber shoes tell you.)

(Nine years later, I've also shed the elephant jeans and cigs as well, though I still don't have too many shoes.)

I think -- at the risk of being pelted and trolled -- that the harder choice is happiness. In everything. Take writing. I've been sitting here a good hour, letting myself be drawn in by Tumblr (MAJOR TIMESUCK BTW) or Twitter or LJ before finally deciding to make a second cup of Nesvita and write.

In all honesty, had this been a sad thing entirely I would have had at least a page in five minutes -- this was how I rolled for the good part of twenty-two years, mostly between sixteen and twenty-two, if we were to be precise; pining after and falling for the wrong people and looking down second-floor windows watching people get together and trying to ignore how my open palm itched at the sight of hands held.

At the time, I had many words for the wanting in my chest, and too much time alone to spend before blank pages. I used to write things longhand while smoking in my room. Looking back -- yeah, so indie-movie, wasn't that? An eighteen-year-old girl trying to find herself, navigating this all-too-new terrain of a just-discovered sexuality.

Fast forward to four years and x number of heartbreaks later -- you know how frightening it is, this feeling of waking up to something undeniably real? I enjoy my dreams because I can control them, believe it or not -- but reality, oh wow. Reality's different altogether.

One day, I just lost my words. It's not that they stopped coming -- it's that whatever came was not enough. I typed a few and often ended up erasing blocks and blocks of paragraphs until there's nothing left, and it's altogether unreal. At the end of it, I'm back at Square One, frustrated -- no, disgusted -- with what limited vocabulary I had.

Certainly, there are words for how I feel? WHY ARE THERE NO WORDS FOR HOW I FEEL?

I have a word for that feeling that engulfs me whenever I see old photographs, for that moment my heart stills upon catching a glimpse of something that can never be returned -- "nostalgia" does it for me, really.

The things I don't have words for -- those moments I wake in the middle of the night and catch the look on your face as you slept. The feel of your hand around mine. That giddiness that bubbles up inside me whenever I hear a song that reminds me of you. That space on your shoulder that always needs kneading. This feeling I get whenever we score something fantastic in book stores. The shared grief we have over losses we cannot share with anyone else outside of us.

And with each day I spend with you, the wordlessness grows -- that look you give me whenever you ask me to get you a glass of milk even if I'm already in bed. The triumph I feel whenever I manage to convince you to get up and turn off the lights. The quiet Sunday night domesticity.

Where have all the good words gone? But then, most days I don't really care; I have all I need, thank you.

(I remember having read somewhere about how frightening it all is when you get what you want, because now you truly have something to lose. I ought to be afraid, really -- this is what I want, what I've wanted for a long time -- but then, I'm not really thinking that far.)

That said - month 36 today. I have never loved this boldly all my life.