[the book of love]

symphony under the microscope lens

i write in my diary while i’m watching doctor who. i can’t do one thing at a time; i play yugoslav rock when i’m reading & 70s folk when i’m studying & radiohead when i’m going to sleep, a playlist with a helpful cover of chandler bing photoshopped as holding ok computer. today i wrote anyway, there’s so such thing as ‘one true love’ and then i dropped the subject. if you asked me to form a hypothesis on the issue, i wouldn’t be able to say a word, if you asked me a question while we were watching a romantic comedy, i’d give you a thesis statement. i think in splinters, fragments, i’ve never been able to collect myself long enough to write an exam. but i promised you a letter and that’s what you’re going to get.

inconclusive list of refutations for why the concept of ‘one true love’ doesn’t exist: the human life span is too long. you can love a lot of different people. you can love a lot of people in different ways, maybe a friend is the love of your life and a lover is the love of your life and a sibling is the love of your life. no need to constrain this demarcation to romance, it’s unnecessary. there aren’t strict lines around love, you decide what your behaviour and choice connote. you can love someone who doesn’t love you. someone you don’t love can love you. maybe you’re his one true love. human relationships are complicated; the artistic endeavour to reduce this to 1 story, 1 person, 1 happy ending is merely another entry in the long list of attempts to make human life digestible. or maybe just comprehensible.

i reckon you would like this letter if i gave you the chance to read it.

here’s a fantasy i buy into, though. there’s a love of your life. a romantic love, if we want to be particular, while siblings and friends and rivals can be complicated and constrained, nobody suggests you can only have one of those. i think there’s a romantic love of your life, not in the sense that you marry someone and then it’s done forever, not in the sense that the universe provides, but in the sense that you choose. i’ve often thought, well i could be hung up forever on the boy who broke my heart when i was 18, and then he would be the love of my life, but i’m choosing something else. i’m a scientist and i believe in observable facts. i’m a poet and i believe in your voice.

i could not give you a theory of relationships without talking about a relationship, because it isn’t my nature to explain things without touchstones, places the fluttering dramatic stanzas attract truth and lie down on the grass. i could not talk about life without talking about mine. as a corollary of this statement, i could not talk about love without talking about you.

and i don’t know where to start. i don’t know how to reconcile my weak, romantic, dreamlike notions with the real world everyone is always insisting to me exists with me in it. i don’t know how to explain, in an era of text message politics and 12 year olds boasts of ‘situationships’ and a laundry list of women i know who wring their hands over marriages i’m not sure they want to take place, what the notion of romantic love could mean to me. it can’t be understood. love, as the modern person understands it, cannot exist in four year friendships where the idea is ridiculed. love cannot exist so fleeting, so barren, in the space of months. it’s too short a demarcation of time. it’s too meaningless of an idea. i have no concept of justifying myself, i just explain the world as i happen to see it. i toyed with going through this piece after i wrote it and cutting the word ‘i’, but it occurred to me that i would be cutting the eyes out, and in any case i am now resorting to the familiar technical machinery of writing to avoid addressing the real subject.

my diary entries are more cohesive; i don’t expect anyone to read them, after all. i don’t expect you to read this either and you are the only person i am writing to.

i remember, you know. i don’t think love has to be like the movies and in fact i think it often isn’t, because the story of how awkward embarrassed ashamed young people happen to slot into each other is unpleasant to experience let alone watch. but things which are easy—technicolour hollywood romances where everyone’s issues are resolvable in a ninety minute timeframe—are only worth watching, not experiencing. i have a time delay on emotional resonance; i never realize how i’ve felt until it’s too late to do anything about it, the decay has already set in. it’s not very pretty. you make me think that no amount of waiting would ever be too long. you made me think that i have been reductive and narrow-minded in my portrait of human nature, you have set all i thought about the world into disarray. it was a chance meeting. it was the quantum revolution.

you told me that the thing which defines intelligent life is a sense of wonder. i have strayed too far from the general and forayed into a deeply specific portrait, although maybe it doesn’t make sense to other people, although maybe you can meet someone who makes you realize that no matter how illegible you feel, there is someone who sees straight through you like a pane of glass. i have taken apart your good name brick by brick. let me put it back together. it was a case of misplaced wonder.

fact: we choose the loves of our lives. even the most ignoble of scientists cannot refute this, we choose who we love, our society chugs along powered by the choices and fires of human connection. fact: despite our simplistic portrayals which would suggest something contrary, people are not as emotionally well-versed as television sets would have you believe, they say the wrong things and hurt people they love and run away when they shouldn’t have and stay when they shouldn’t have too. people are run-on sentences. there’s no logic, but sometimes there’s also no reason to excise them from the text.

in any case i never had superpowers or an innate understanding of how things fit together. even as i am writing this i am at a loss for how to manage the dishevelled procedure my own life has fallen into. i always saw my writing as a mechanism to understand that which didn’t make sense to me, but you saw it as intelligent machinery, a piece of equipment i possessed and other people didn’t. you told me you’d never been rendered like that before. i didn’t know how to explain to you that you were the only thing which defied interpretation, which i couldn’t reduce to a portrait. even this text is photographic evidence. you resist the act of comparison; i think in all 118 elements you are something entirely new.

i was going to write a thesis statement on love. i was going to tell you, in footnotes and the margins, what i couldn’t tell my diary. i was writing to attempt the impossible: articulate something i couldn’t figure out while writing doctor who. there is no one true love, though, and there is no thesis statement. any general conjecture i make on the topic is about another person, a person i have and can and will hurt, a person i have and can and will leave. i reduce the alchemical nature of connection to a couple of rhyming lines, sporadic paragraphs, superficial and declarative sentences. i become entrenched so deeply in my roads of winding fallacy i feel like no one can pull me out, no straight shot of human emotion can possibly recuse me from the stupidity of my choices.

you said, i promised i’d always be here & i meant it.

i felt, in the fog of spring, terribly understood.