after love
I want to be able to write a great love poem without being cliche. I also know it will be impossible, utterly impossible, and I also know why it will be impossible.See, in those tiresome hours when I'm trying to get a poem ready for workshop, I allow myself to care about everything in the world, or as much as I know about it. I allow the most unthinkable thoughts and the most disassociative images, then filter them down. Sometimes it's so overwhelming that I huddle scared in front of my computer because the filter isn't working as well, and my thoughts exceed my emotional capacity.
I don't like opening the door to love because it's just asking for trouble. Because love isn't the last stop to the ride, I would have to allow myself to feel all of the inner rage and angst and sorrows that also come with being in a relationship. And it gets ugly. And sometimes I don't know how to stop it, and my boyfriend's wondering why the hell I'm so psycho all of a sudden. At that point, I don't really know how to explain myself. Wouldn't it be nice to write a nice little sonnet proclaiming pure love and nothing but?
To me, that's just a form of dishonesty. To boil everything down to a single-word emotion is like whittling a redwood down to a redneck's toothpick. And especially when things I'd be boiling down are things like...the way I sweep away the clumps of hair and dust after he leaves, or how he smells like grapefruit, the number of tampons I have left at his place, the unwashed spoons at mine, the Skittles that I was sure were going to fall out of the freezer, how tired I get of just wondering if I'm doing something wrong, how tired he gets at asserting me it's nothing, the way we get so mad at each other, and then getting upset for us getting mad at each other...
It's just such a pain that I usually don't bother. And I also don't believe in a relationship "getting better" or "getting worse," because shit can always happen, but so can great surprises. I think a relationship is less an image of Sisyphus rolling a boulder uphill, but two people keeping a beach ball aloft.
I think the biggest thing that scares me about writing about love is how I allow myself to love the things and people that I don't normally allow myself to. And sometimes I think about how great it would be if for a day, I could just freely love. Not in a physical way, of course. But just to remove those emotional bounderies that could be tricky. Even thinking about this possibility makes me feel guilty, and that's exactly the thing I'm talking about.
But I can't help but love him, and it's the most tiring thing. So sometimes I pull up a new document on Word and sit there willing myself to write a love poem, like as if I had something to prove. And he's so good and so stable, and I'm so not. I don't know how he deals with me, especially when I get really sad for no reason and start lashing out at him so I wouldn't seem weak. It's pathetic, I'm aware. And I work so hard to be good, I really do--but sometimes it feels like I'm sabotaging my own efforts by questioning and prodding and bitching. I really can't help it, and I wish I could, you know?
And it's just so easy to sabotage your own relationship. It really is. Especially when it's so great that you don't even have a basis for comparison, because then how do you know when something is right or wrong? What's "normal" for a relationship? A lot of the time, we teeter at the edge of a break-up because things aren't going so well and we want to "preserve what we have." And that's just a silly idea. I think on some level, because we love each other, we have the obligation to make things work. I think it would be unfair to our future partners, having someone who's "preserving" a love with someone else, because preservation equal potential return, yes?
I'm getting completely off-topic, but at the time I'm just really happy to have the time to blog and be silly and abstract. And to be honest, I'm glad that my relationship has flaws; otherwise, I'd just be deathly suspicious of it. All women would be, because that's just the way we were trained. If a designer bag is too cheap, it's probably fake. If things are going too well, something's bad's going to happen right around the corner.
posted by Tiffany @ 11:53 PM
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