Trust me, I would have been super proud if I could have thought of a more witty title for this one. But how do you find something from the mind to represent something from the heart? It's nearly impossible. The two rarely work in collaboration.
We all know what a mind is, what facts are, how to memorize them, but everyone has a different definition of happiness, sadness, depression, stress, anxiety, anger, joy. Especially love.
So what is love? Where does it come from? How do you know when you have it? Every dictionary seems to say something different.
love [luhv] noun/verb
1. a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person
2. a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child or friend
3. sexual passion or desire
4. a person toward whom love is felt, beloved person, sweetheart
5. used in direct address as a term of endearment, affection, or the like
6. a love affair, an intensely amourous experience, amour
7. sexual intercourse, copulation
8. a personification of sexual affection, as in Eros or Cupid
9. affectionate concern for the well-being of others
10. strong predilection, enthusiasm or liking of anything
11. the object or thing so liked
12. the benevolent love of God for His creatures, or the revertent affection due from them to God
13. in tennis, a score of zero, nothing
14. a word formerly used in communications to represent the letter L.
I guess the only true definition a person can ever get of love is the one they write themselves, and that really has to come from what they know.
Well, this is what I know.
If I didn't believe in love, I'd be lying in a bathtub somewhere, cutting my wrists and crying my eyes out. The sad thing about that is, it's absolutely true. I think I'm just about the most pathetic person in the world, because the only thing that keeps me going everyday is the thought that someday, somehow, I'll meet someone who will get to know me, and learn to truely love me, and the parts about myself that I hate will be the parts that he likes the most.
Yeah, I know. It's bad.
We as humans go by living our day to day lives without so much as a second thought to how we feel, because emotions are temporary. "I'm feeling happy today. Hooray." "I'm feeling sad today. This sucks."
But love... We take love so much more seriously because love never leaves, nor fades, nor dies.
And that scares the motherfucking shit out of us.
There is no line between love and lust. I always wonder why the hell a person would draw one. You have to have one or the other, according to most people. The girl you want in bed is a different person than the girl you want to talk to and trust. Why the hell CAN'T they be the same person? Love and lust are two sides of the same coin. The only advice I can give about that one is don't think of the world as having two dimensions. Think in 3D.
Obsession, however, is a whole different ball park.
As a girl who has fought obsession for more of her waking life, I can tell you right now that it's hard to tell the difference, until you feel love. Obsession mimics the signs of love: thinking about the person, wanting to be with the person all the time. The only way I can describe it, is obsession feels like screaming. Love feels like laughing. When you're obsessed, it's like a hole keeps caving in again and again in your very core. When you're with the person you're obsessed with, there's this huge release, a swell of happiness. It's not genuine, though. It's like an addiction to drugs: you're just getting your fix and then when you're without it, you get withdrawl. You want to give more, because it makes you feel like you might get more, but it doesn't work that way. Because, at the end of the day, when you've given everything you have, you'll only just have nothing left for yourself.
Love feels like you're getting filled up. It's like this person came bearing a puzzle piece that finished the picture. You can't stop smiling, you can't stop singing, and suddenly you have the strength to go one.
It's beautiful and great and growing. And it only gets better as time goes on. Life is too short not to love, or to complicate it, or throw drama over it.
In the purest sense, love is a soul. It's a great presence that floats through the world, the closest humans on earth will ever get to heaven. It's a higher plane of a peaceful mind. When you're heart belongs to someone, and theirs to you, and you can trust them completely with it, the whole world could bend to the unity between you.
The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Friday, November 13, 2009
Quiet
This was my Creative Writing short story assignment. Thought I'd share it with the world.
Everything was quiet. The hollow walls, the phantoms of what had just been. Martin had been told by his therapist that he could probably use quiet once in a while, but Martin hates silence. He hates everything about the emptiness that follows it, too.
Martin had been driving home not ten minutes earlier. It was snowing, and a thick, gray layer of slush covered the road all around the residential area. He had just been thinking to himself how poetic the woods are in the wintertime. The forest feels like a battlefield the moment after the last shot had been fired. A vaccum of sound a presence seemed to haunt through the trees, which stood like the skeletons of dead soldiers. Their roots were their tired, traveled feet. The branches were their ribs, now empty and hollow, though they once breathed life and took in the world around them. The little spindly twigs were their fingers, spinning into the air, reaching for the sky as the soldiers made their last impressions in the cold ground.
Martin like the car. It wasn't quiet, but it was relaxing. Snowflakes lightly fell upon the windshield and were swept away cleanly and urgently by the wipers. Against the windshield, the wipers made a rhythmic squeaking sound that Martin could both dance to and could lull him to sleep. The hum of the engine and purr of the tires against the slippery road put his mind perfectly at peace. When he thought about it, the car was like a well-tuned orchestra, and he it's conductor. A beautiful symphony of sound and white noise which he could control at any moment, change any pitch, tweak any tone. The steering wheel felt like an old friend. After five years of owning this car, the wheel and the seat beneath him had formed to his shape, perfectly cradling his body and palms and holding him gently to the heart of this great machine.
Sometimes, Martin liked to pretend. He was quite known amongst his friends and family for his vivid imagination. I am the car, Martin would think, and he extended himself out of the seat, and became the car himself. He could feel his heart pumping those pistons and pressing energy throughout his system. His hands and feet rounded to become the wheels, spinning and spinning and gripping the roads with expert precision. From his eyes, he shot beams of light, so he could drive at night and see what he was doing. Maybe he didn't even have to be this car. He could be one of those amazingly high-tech new cars where the headlights can turn with the car. Maybe he could be painted top banana yellow with racing stripes. He could have a spoiler and amazing rear suspension. And then, no matter what, he could drive and drive for as long as he wanted, only stopping for gas or an oil change.
Martin also liked his neighborhood. He had grown up in the city, and always watched shows and commercials about life in a house, in the suburbs, where kids rode yellow buses home from school. Mothers cooked big dinners all day for their kids, which his mother had never done. His life consisted of sirens and dirty subway cars and TV dinners, and he had promised himself at a very young age that someday he would have a life like they did on shows and in Butterball Thanksgiving Turkey commercials. HE was proud of himself for having pursued and lived out his dream. These roads were all named after flowers, and all the houses looked pristine and white. A snowman stood on every other snow-covered lawn, as if it were a monument, erected to say, "A Happy Family with Happy Children lives in this house." All the houses hung American flags, but in March, some hung Irish flags.
Martin didn't like quiet, and he didn't like going home.
Arriving in his quaint little house with the new Welcome mat, he opened the door easily, using a key. The inside of the house was as common and unimpressive and perfect as every other house on the street. Walls painted muted colors, a bookcase here and there, and cute little coffee tables rounded with elegant, company-worthy chairs. Wood-burning fireplaces were also common on this side of town.
There was one room, though, that was different. The Sitting Room, he called it when he moved in. That day, it had been plain and white with a quaint window seat and light blue drapes. Opening the double doors now, he felt like he was stepping into a different world.
His eyes went immediately to the walls. They were painted bright blues to match the drapes, bright yellows to compliment the blues, pure greens to mute the yellow. It was so colorful and so bizzare, yet so beautiful how everything had been wound together. There were no longer plain couches lounging around the floor, but instead it was bare, and there were shelves upon shelves of paints, paper, canvas, and clay. And in the corner, there sat a easel, in the light cast by the window, a girl sitting in the window seat.
The Studio, she called it when she moved in with him.
Martin had been struck by her beauty the first day he saw her, third in line, ordering a vanilla bean Frapuccino. They both commuted to the city for work, and like clockwork, they both ordered coffee at Starbucks at 8 in the morning. It was a week before Martin worked up the never to say hello, another before he got the courage to ask her name.
"Call me Aria," she said, right before flashing a grin and floating out the door, leaving the scent of magic in her wake.
She had made him love her. "Aria, Aria, Aria," he had whispered in her ear so many times, just enjoying the way it sounded as it rolled off his tongue. "My beautiful little song." Her smile, her smell, the way she held him: they all seemed to come togeth and fuse his heart to her in a way in which he simply could not move. She always knew the right thing to say, and was always thinking of something profound. There was not a dark moment she could not bring light into.
She had made him hate her. Martin had always thought he'd have a wife and companion who would stay home, keep things neat and tidy, fold laundry, make dinner, raise the kids, and be there with a grin and a "How was your day, dear?" when he came home from work each evening. He was not ashamed to admit that maybe he was a little bit sexist. What American male isn't? But Aria was none of these things. She worked at an art museum, sometimes until 2 in the afternoon, sometimes until 10 at night. She disliked cooking and cleaning, and took microwave meals as her personal savior. She loved children, but was revolted by the thought of having them herself. She seemed to be especially squeemish about diaper changing. She was a free spirit, but too much. WAY too much. A feminist, obsessed with her womanly freedom. HE knew she really loved him, though. She would not have moved in with him if she didn't truely love him.
That is why he hated her. He hated her because she made him love her, and question his dedication to The Plan. He hated her because she loved him enough to sacrifice what she believed in to be with him, and he hated himself for being so unwilling to give up anything for her, yet she made him want to. He WANTED to give her everything.
Why couldn't she just reject him? Why was she so afraid to confront him, to challenge him? She was an angel, and such a beautiful mess. He wanted her to hurt him, to let her have a fault in her that could stop him from loving her. She was everything he hated, and yet he loved every inch of her.
She looked up from her work and grinned broadly at him, her bright smile hitting him like a million tiny rays of sunlight. It made him swoon, it enraged him. She set her paint palette aside and got up from her window seat. Her dark hair was knotted up in a bun, secured with a pencil, she wore an old t-shirt and unflattering sweatpants, and she was covered in flecks of dry paint, but she was beautiful.
"Hello, love," she greeted, and looped both arms around his neck.
Just ask she hugged him, his frustration and anger was at it's peak, and he pushed her away with one swift motion.
"Don't touch me," he said. It wasn't agressive or mad sounding at all. It rolled off his lips almost the way "It rained today" would: with a resigned hush and factuality.
She sighed and reached for a small clear class that had been standing at the foot of the easel. It swam with thin red liquid. Blood? No, Martin knew better.
"Why are you drinking?"
"What?"
"I said, 'Why are you drinking?'"
"I'm just having a little wine. Are you okay?"
Martin rubbed his eyelids. "Damn it, Aria."
"What? You seriously need to relax. It's not like it's illegal. " He gaped at her as she shifted her weight and put one hand on her hip. "I was feeling uninspired." She shrugged and turned toward her canvas.
He stared at the back of her head, the waves of black hair like an ocean, a dark sea of swirls and voliminous hair. The hair that smelled like acrylics and jasmine shampoo.
"You are not some Bohemian, impoverished street artist begging in the city. Drinking is never the way for inspiration."
"It's not like I got madly hammered. I just had a couple of glasses of wine."
The thought of her, his angel, drinking... it burned like fire. The alcohol moving through her system, contaminating such a pure soul. No, not her.
The travelled to the easel. "What is this? Just red and pink stripes?"
She was silent, so he kept talking.
"What's it supposed to be anyway? What the hell did you paint?"
"Love," her tiny voice squeaked. "I painted love."
And that just set him over the edge.
Two things happened then. The first was Martin felt the peace of the car completely detach from him, leaving this empty husk onf anger and impulse. The second was time seemed to suddenly slow down.
He reached forward agressively, grabbing the painting by its side, his fingers smudging the paint on the edges. She reacted on impulse herself, lunging to protect this painting, this simple representation of such a strong and powerful emotion.
"No," her voice cried.
They fought for dominance over the canvas for what felt like eternity, dragging each other around the room. The easel clattered to the floor with a wooden echo, the glass of wine tipped and spilt the red liquid over the clean hardwood. Finally, her fingers slipped, and Martin flung the painting to the ground with a loud clatter. She began to rush past him to scoop in up, but he grabbed her forearms forcibly and thrust her away from him. She stumbled to the floor a bit, but as she began to rise, collapse again.
The smack seemed to echo through the room like a never ending replay. The sound pulled Martin out his moment of bestial impulse, and he finally saw. The room was now in a disarray, paints from the palette running like rivers on the floor, mixing with one another and the wine.
He looked down at her. Her arms were rubbed with Indian burns, and smudged with pink and red paint. Her flawless, pale cheek was dyed red with the swells of blood blooming under her skin. He saw her face opening, her eyes begin to flow sadness.
No. He has hurt her. He had brought pain to Aria.
His mouth gaped, moving, grasping to form the words, any words that would make this right again. But then, she was gone, and he sat in The Studio alone.
Martin hated quiet, because a hush only descended upon his life when she was gone.
Everything was quiet. The hollow walls, the phantoms of what had just been. Martin had been told by his therapist that he could probably use quiet once in a while, but Martin hates silence. He hates everything about the emptiness that follows it, too.
Martin had been driving home not ten minutes earlier. It was snowing, and a thick, gray layer of slush covered the road all around the residential area. He had just been thinking to himself how poetic the woods are in the wintertime. The forest feels like a battlefield the moment after the last shot had been fired. A vaccum of sound a presence seemed to haunt through the trees, which stood like the skeletons of dead soldiers. Their roots were their tired, traveled feet. The branches were their ribs, now empty and hollow, though they once breathed life and took in the world around them. The little spindly twigs were their fingers, spinning into the air, reaching for the sky as the soldiers made their last impressions in the cold ground.
Martin like the car. It wasn't quiet, but it was relaxing. Snowflakes lightly fell upon the windshield and were swept away cleanly and urgently by the wipers. Against the windshield, the wipers made a rhythmic squeaking sound that Martin could both dance to and could lull him to sleep. The hum of the engine and purr of the tires against the slippery road put his mind perfectly at peace. When he thought about it, the car was like a well-tuned orchestra, and he it's conductor. A beautiful symphony of sound and white noise which he could control at any moment, change any pitch, tweak any tone. The steering wheel felt like an old friend. After five years of owning this car, the wheel and the seat beneath him had formed to his shape, perfectly cradling his body and palms and holding him gently to the heart of this great machine.
Sometimes, Martin liked to pretend. He was quite known amongst his friends and family for his vivid imagination. I am the car, Martin would think, and he extended himself out of the seat, and became the car himself. He could feel his heart pumping those pistons and pressing energy throughout his system. His hands and feet rounded to become the wheels, spinning and spinning and gripping the roads with expert precision. From his eyes, he shot beams of light, so he could drive at night and see what he was doing. Maybe he didn't even have to be this car. He could be one of those amazingly high-tech new cars where the headlights can turn with the car. Maybe he could be painted top banana yellow with racing stripes. He could have a spoiler and amazing rear suspension. And then, no matter what, he could drive and drive for as long as he wanted, only stopping for gas or an oil change.
Martin also liked his neighborhood. He had grown up in the city, and always watched shows and commercials about life in a house, in the suburbs, where kids rode yellow buses home from school. Mothers cooked big dinners all day for their kids, which his mother had never done. His life consisted of sirens and dirty subway cars and TV dinners, and he had promised himself at a very young age that someday he would have a life like they did on shows and in Butterball Thanksgiving Turkey commercials. HE was proud of himself for having pursued and lived out his dream. These roads were all named after flowers, and all the houses looked pristine and white. A snowman stood on every other snow-covered lawn, as if it were a monument, erected to say, "A Happy Family with Happy Children lives in this house." All the houses hung American flags, but in March, some hung Irish flags.
Martin didn't like quiet, and he didn't like going home.
Arriving in his quaint little house with the new Welcome mat, he opened the door easily, using a key. The inside of the house was as common and unimpressive and perfect as every other house on the street. Walls painted muted colors, a bookcase here and there, and cute little coffee tables rounded with elegant, company-worthy chairs. Wood-burning fireplaces were also common on this side of town.
There was one room, though, that was different. The Sitting Room, he called it when he moved in. That day, it had been plain and white with a quaint window seat and light blue drapes. Opening the double doors now, he felt like he was stepping into a different world.
His eyes went immediately to the walls. They were painted bright blues to match the drapes, bright yellows to compliment the blues, pure greens to mute the yellow. It was so colorful and so bizzare, yet so beautiful how everything had been wound together. There were no longer plain couches lounging around the floor, but instead it was bare, and there were shelves upon shelves of paints, paper, canvas, and clay. And in the corner, there sat a easel, in the light cast by the window, a girl sitting in the window seat.
The Studio, she called it when she moved in with him.
Martin had been struck by her beauty the first day he saw her, third in line, ordering a vanilla bean Frapuccino. They both commuted to the city for work, and like clockwork, they both ordered coffee at Starbucks at 8 in the morning. It was a week before Martin worked up the never to say hello, another before he got the courage to ask her name.
"Call me Aria," she said, right before flashing a grin and floating out the door, leaving the scent of magic in her wake.
She had made him love her. "Aria, Aria, Aria," he had whispered in her ear so many times, just enjoying the way it sounded as it rolled off his tongue. "My beautiful little song." Her smile, her smell, the way she held him: they all seemed to come togeth and fuse his heart to her in a way in which he simply could not move. She always knew the right thing to say, and was always thinking of something profound. There was not a dark moment she could not bring light into.
She had made him hate her. Martin had always thought he'd have a wife and companion who would stay home, keep things neat and tidy, fold laundry, make dinner, raise the kids, and be there with a grin and a "How was your day, dear?" when he came home from work each evening. He was not ashamed to admit that maybe he was a little bit sexist. What American male isn't? But Aria was none of these things. She worked at an art museum, sometimes until 2 in the afternoon, sometimes until 10 at night. She disliked cooking and cleaning, and took microwave meals as her personal savior. She loved children, but was revolted by the thought of having them herself. She seemed to be especially squeemish about diaper changing. She was a free spirit, but too much. WAY too much. A feminist, obsessed with her womanly freedom. HE knew she really loved him, though. She would not have moved in with him if she didn't truely love him.
That is why he hated her. He hated her because she made him love her, and question his dedication to The Plan. He hated her because she loved him enough to sacrifice what she believed in to be with him, and he hated himself for being so unwilling to give up anything for her, yet she made him want to. He WANTED to give her everything.
Why couldn't she just reject him? Why was she so afraid to confront him, to challenge him? She was an angel, and such a beautiful mess. He wanted her to hurt him, to let her have a fault in her that could stop him from loving her. She was everything he hated, and yet he loved every inch of her.
She looked up from her work and grinned broadly at him, her bright smile hitting him like a million tiny rays of sunlight. It made him swoon, it enraged him. She set her paint palette aside and got up from her window seat. Her dark hair was knotted up in a bun, secured with a pencil, she wore an old t-shirt and unflattering sweatpants, and she was covered in flecks of dry paint, but she was beautiful.
"Hello, love," she greeted, and looped both arms around his neck.
Just ask she hugged him, his frustration and anger was at it's peak, and he pushed her away with one swift motion.
"Don't touch me," he said. It wasn't agressive or mad sounding at all. It rolled off his lips almost the way "It rained today" would: with a resigned hush and factuality.
She sighed and reached for a small clear class that had been standing at the foot of the easel. It swam with thin red liquid. Blood? No, Martin knew better.
"Why are you drinking?"
"What?"
"I said, 'Why are you drinking?'"
"I'm just having a little wine. Are you okay?"
Martin rubbed his eyelids. "Damn it, Aria."
"What? You seriously need to relax. It's not like it's illegal. " He gaped at her as she shifted her weight and put one hand on her hip. "I was feeling uninspired." She shrugged and turned toward her canvas.
He stared at the back of her head, the waves of black hair like an ocean, a dark sea of swirls and voliminous hair. The hair that smelled like acrylics and jasmine shampoo.
"You are not some Bohemian, impoverished street artist begging in the city. Drinking is never the way for inspiration."
"It's not like I got madly hammered. I just had a couple of glasses of wine."
The thought of her, his angel, drinking... it burned like fire. The alcohol moving through her system, contaminating such a pure soul. No, not her.
The travelled to the easel. "What is this? Just red and pink stripes?"
She was silent, so he kept talking.
"What's it supposed to be anyway? What the hell did you paint?"
"Love," her tiny voice squeaked. "I painted love."
And that just set him over the edge.
Two things happened then. The first was Martin felt the peace of the car completely detach from him, leaving this empty husk onf anger and impulse. The second was time seemed to suddenly slow down.
He reached forward agressively, grabbing the painting by its side, his fingers smudging the paint on the edges. She reacted on impulse herself, lunging to protect this painting, this simple representation of such a strong and powerful emotion.
"No," her voice cried.
They fought for dominance over the canvas for what felt like eternity, dragging each other around the room. The easel clattered to the floor with a wooden echo, the glass of wine tipped and spilt the red liquid over the clean hardwood. Finally, her fingers slipped, and Martin flung the painting to the ground with a loud clatter. She began to rush past him to scoop in up, but he grabbed her forearms forcibly and thrust her away from him. She stumbled to the floor a bit, but as she began to rise, collapse again.
The smack seemed to echo through the room like a never ending replay. The sound pulled Martin out his moment of bestial impulse, and he finally saw. The room was now in a disarray, paints from the palette running like rivers on the floor, mixing with one another and the wine.
He looked down at her. Her arms were rubbed with Indian burns, and smudged with pink and red paint. Her flawless, pale cheek was dyed red with the swells of blood blooming under her skin. He saw her face opening, her eyes begin to flow sadness.
No. He has hurt her. He had brought pain to Aria.
His mouth gaped, moving, grasping to form the words, any words that would make this right again. But then, she was gone, and he sat in The Studio alone.
Martin hated quiet, because a hush only descended upon his life when she was gone.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Staples, Stitches, and Adhesive Tape
I never thought much about my soul
Or if it might die before I grew old
Or knew that death could be so cold
Freezing where I stood.
And now I'm just blowing off steam
Perfect as my life may seem
Mouth stitched shut, yet longing to scream
I only wishing that I could
I'm holding my breath and my heart stopped beating
I'm weeping in silence as my spirit is bleeding
And on my knees, I'm still and pleading
For the pressure to stop
The pressure for things is all around
I feel it suffocate and push me down
As my body sinks deep into the ground
My limbs being chopped
Even though my head's still flying
I feel my heart is slowly dying
My tearless eyes keep on crying
Wait for the kill
And then the evil pain extends
My entire essence breaks and bends
As I wonder when it will end
I become completely still.
Or if it might die before I grew old
Or knew that death could be so cold
Freezing where I stood.
And now I'm just blowing off steam
Perfect as my life may seem
Mouth stitched shut, yet longing to scream
I only wishing that I could
I'm holding my breath and my heart stopped beating
I'm weeping in silence as my spirit is bleeding
And on my knees, I'm still and pleading
For the pressure to stop
The pressure for things is all around
I feel it suffocate and push me down
As my body sinks deep into the ground
My limbs being chopped
Even though my head's still flying
I feel my heart is slowly dying
My tearless eyes keep on crying
Wait for the kill
And then the evil pain extends
My entire essence breaks and bends
As I wonder when it will end
I become completely still.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
The World at a Glance
Who are you? Who am I? Who is anyone?
Are we one person or many? It is the truely wise that can see how every life intertwines, explodes, and collides.
We are everyone. The entire universe has one collective soul. Feel the connection.
Are we one person or many? It is the truely wise that can see how every life intertwines, explodes, and collides.
We are everyone. The entire universe has one collective soul. Feel the connection.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
