It's been a good long while since I actually wrote about anything deeply personal, and for good reason - I knew what I would write. And I think I'm a bit too old to be writing self-serving emotional dhiarhea that's poorly disguising the want and need for someone out in that big ol' cyberspace to understand, to say "it's okay" and kiss one's botty better. And if it wasn't a post about that, it would be a post full of macho posturing, an attempt to build up confidence and armor to shield one from the pains of emotions whilst simultaneously trying to tell the world "look at me! I am strong and powerful and I can withstand any shit you give me!"
Balls to that.
From the moment I started blogging I believed that there is nothing else to blog about but the truth. If you believe in something or feel something and are absolutely ok with the idea that you believe or feel that something then there should be no fear in writing about it. I enjoy writing, that's what I do, and one of the things a blog helps me do is keep writing, using them words so that I don't not write so good as I used to have.
And right now I feel absolutely ok with talking about my life with regards to love.
"The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread." - Mother Teresa
Even though the 'cooties' disease no longer became infectious as girls turned to women but instead mutated into a monthly scheduled emotional defect known as PMS (that's a joke, ladies. Have a sense of humor for God's sake).
And of course, over time, one grows up to the age where girls and boys start 'discovering' themselves.
"Where there is love, there is pain." - Spanish Proverb
I remember my first crush with a French exchange student. I remember the moment I laid eyes on her and remember the dizzying sensation of being in her presence.
I also remember a different dizzying sensation of being in her presence after she went out with a guy who pretended to be my friend so that he could get closer to her and make a move.
Ouch.
I remember my first love. I remember how connected I felt to her, how incredible that first kiss under a tree in Hyde park felt and how insanely good it felt to be with someone who felt something for me.
I also remember being dumped over the phone and subsequently beating the phone up. I remember still trying to be friends with her whilst consoling her over how heart broken she was after a friend of mine who went out with her after me dumped her and I remember said 'friend' enrolling in my A level college and being a total dick as far as this past relationship was concerned.
Double Ouch. Goddamn. I hope at the very least my circle of friends is better than it was back then.
I'd go on with more examples, but they'd start to look repetitive and the point is clear - love can be a painful goddamn thing to experience. Unrequited love, more to the point. Plato once said that "love is a grave and mental disease" and in a way he's right - love defies all forms of logic and reason. It is every single emotion ever possible to experience, both positive and negative, bundled into one huge heart shaped blob.
I know a lot of people who've experienced the things I've written above - the heart ache that comes with love, and as time goes by and people get older I notice how much love shapes a personality. Or rather, the hurt of love. It reaches to the point that it becomes a dirty word, much dirtier than 'fuck' or 'shit' or 'Rais'.
In particular, I've seen how heartbreak can cause cynicism. How it creates defence mechanisms designed to protect from heartbreak yet at the same time turning the person into someone who doesn't believe in love.
I've seen countless friends who've gone from helpless romantics to mysoginistic players. I've seen girls go from sweet and adorable to pessimistic and cold. All within the single snap of the fingers of love.
And, for a time, I was set to go the same way too. All the way until I met someone who made me feel like that sixteen year old underneath a tree again.
And once again, history repeats itself.
(Except this time no back-stabbing friends were involved, thank fuck.)
But like Kyle in South Park (or is it Stan?) I learnt something today (or rather, over the course of the past month). I learnt that I too could easily take that one step closer towards being colder, more cynical, more pessimistic and more of a mysoginistic cunt.
But I also learnt that I'm not gonna. And I'm not gonna for a very simple reason - I believe in love.
"Love doesn't make the world go round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile." - Franklin P. Jones
Some would say that hardening up and accepting that love is a bitch is growing up - it's becoming a man. The type of man that sleeps all night, works all day, cuts down trees, eats his lunch, goes to the lavatory, spends his Wednesdays shopping and has buttered scones for tea.
Or something like that.
There are people out there who'll tell you that love and romance is a dated concept, an explanation for sexual urges for the times way back in the day when having a shag in civilized society required marriage. There are those that'll tell you that to fall in love is setting yourself up for hurt. There are those that'll tell you that there's no point in love, it's just something to explain the crush your feeling when your young. They'll tell you it's a fools game, a childish concept and something one should grow out of in their teens.
Well, balls to that too, you bunch of pessimistic cowards.
I'd rather be a sixteen year old hurt by love but still believing in it rather than a thirty year old who thinks women are nothing more than sperm receptacles.
I believe in love. I believe in the sheer joy and beauty and the awesomeness of it all. I believe in hope, that things can get better. I believe love because to believe in love is to be idealistic, and there is nothing wrong with idealism. Like love, people stop being idealistic the second all their hopes and dreams shatter.
To believe in love, to be idealistic, to believe in hope in the world is akin to being like a child, and what the fuck is so wrong with wanting to feel like a child again? Do you remember what it felt like to be a child before 'the real world' started creeping again? Life was fucking fantastic back then! You believed anything could happen, anything could be done, anything was possible. Lego would have you transfixed for hours!
But as people grow up and these feelings get shattered people start to face the world with a more 'real world' attitude - self-defense and self-preservation sweats from their every pore. And I look at all these people and I just think it's sad.
Without love, there would be no such thing as art. It's the reason music and movies seem so hollow these days - the love is gone and replaced by materialism and wealth. The last four brilliant films that I saw which came out recently were Slumdog Millionaire, The Wrestler, Star Trek and In Bruges, and in each one you can feel the love the filmmaker and the actors have for the material, the sheer passion in it. Two of them were big hits, two were small indie flicks, neither category matters - the love was there. I wish I could list down the last four brilliant music tracks I've heard recently but unfortunately, I hear no love on the radio except when they play an MJ track in memory of the man which just further shows how terrible music has gotten nowadays. You may like Lady Gaga, but I wouldn't let her ride my disco stick for a bazillion bucks.
I will not tell a lie. This past month I have gone through more pain than I could ever possibly imagine, but I also realized something - even though I had pretty much given up on the love that I felt when I was a young, bright eyed lad with so many pimples I looked like someone drew a face on a lychee peel, even after all that I still ended up meeting someone who made me feel like how I felt when I was Khai the human lychee boy. And whilst I can do without the spots I don't ever want to grow up again as far as love is concerned because it is an incredible feeling.
The only difference between now and then is at least now I'm a little wiser, a little smarter and a little more savvy. One of the biggest things I've found that's held me back for the past few years is that I forgot how to dream and hope and most of all, love. And though it's because of these things that I now find myself unrequited, it does not validate the belief that to dream and hope and love is to be hurt constantly. No. If anything, it proves that anything is possible. Absolutely anything.
It would be so much easier to say "fuck you" to love. It would be easier and a lot less painful to 'accept' that shit will always hit the fan so you better fling some shit back, but then I remember what I used to tell myself when I was growing up - I used to tell myself that I never want to grow up. Now, to reduce ones self to the mind set of a child is pointless because we grow, it's inevitable. But it's not impossible to change one's point of view, to look at everything with that same child-like innocence and belief in the impossible. Imagine looking at the world through those eyes, except now your a little older, your a little wiser, and you know how things work. Imagine how goddamn incredible that would be.
These were the thoughts that helped me sleep last night. This was what went through my head when I still felt the pangs of pain. The Dalai Lama once said "we can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection", and he's right (come on, he's the Dalai Lama. Are you gonna question the Dalai Lama?). I believe that all those people living with their shields and body armor merely think they're happy because they've cut off the concept of love from their lives in order to survive. I'm not knocking it at all, everyone has a right to live the way they wanna live. But I do think that deep down they could be so much happier.
I've gone through a helluva lot emotionally, but I'm still standing. There are people out there who are living with the threat of death or poverty or persecution every waking hour and for some of these people, love is what holds it all together. I have seen true love work in the flesh before my very eyes in all ages, races, shapes and sizes. I've seen it when it works and when it does it works beautifully.
"Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear." - John Lennon
Love is something that will never be understood and I hope it never will. It's that search for the meaning of love that has given us some of the greatest things in the world, more so than the search for the meaning of life which has given us a ton of books written by men who spent so much time thinking all the hair on their heads went to their chin.
I know some of you may be thinking "what a hopeless romantic". That's ok. I'd rather be a hopeless romantic than a pessimistic cunt any day of the week. I believe in love and I believe in hope. I believe in child-like, wide-eyed idealism. And I'm not ashamed of it.
...
...I also believe in a good hard shag between two consenting adults purely for the pleasure of it and as a closing line to inject some humor in these proceedings. I now leave you to your regular reading schedule whilst I examine these slides of the mysterious 'cooties'.
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