Hm Love Pt. 3

Thank God it's over. The freshman year passed by pretty fast but time seemed to grind to a halt during finals. I've been trying to engage in some meaningful reflection about this past year, but I can't say much about it, unfortunately. I came in with few expectations about college and wasn't too pleasantly surprised or disappointed. I got to meet lots of interesting people, which mostly means I got to know few people well. The year had its ups and downs. (As I am typing this, something ridiculous just happens, which I will explain later.) Schoolwork was tedious for the most part, and I worked hard to keep my grades up. So to sum it up, just another tree ring for the ancient redwood that I am. No big.

I've had a chance to talk to a few friends about their college experiences, and I am happy to hear many of them tell me they've grown as human beings and learned important life lessons. Sadly I can't testify to the former (in fact I may be more sinister than before) but I do think I learned an important life lesson. If you've had the misfortune of hearing me discuss topics of any discernible significance in the past, you may be familiar with my diatribes about love and those who believe in it. I used to argue that love and lust were not the disparate entities people made them out to be, that love is merely a construct borne from the human penchant for attaching higher significance to simple infatuation. I also examined what authors and thinkers had said about love and took particular fancy to the notion that love is a spiritually transformative experience in which deep respect for another offers the opportunity to reconcile with one's own shortcomings in character. Blah blah blah. The only analogy I can think of to describe these terribly pretentious and inane endeavors is a baby that refuses to walk unless it can figure out why it was born with two feet. I've learned this past year that love exists no matter how elusive its definition. The sooner you discover this truth, the better. So how did I, a self-proclaimed skeptic of love, come to accept it? When it happened to me, I demonstrated a number of symptoms that were so unusual and unprecedented that they could not be attributed to anything else. For example, I gained a sudden increase in appetite and ate platefuls of food at the school cafeteria I detest. I genuinely savored the taste of food during this period; I wasn't eating just to get through the day or to stop my hands from shaking. I developed a sense of confidence about the person I was. It was not swagger but a feeling of pride and contentment about my identity. It's not as though I had harbored insecurities or found faults with myself before. But I had never fucking reveled in being me. The most telling sign was that I was happier than ever before. The competition's not even close. And you know, I was there when Robert Horry hit that three against the Kings in 2002. I did not think I had it in me to feel the kind of sustained intense happiness that I did. My friends commented on how ridiculously happy I looked when they ran into me between classes. I had an immense desire to live and goddamn it felt so good. So good.

But as most people know, if you don't fold your cards early in this love game, your only option is to go all in. And when you lose, it wreaks absolute havoc. This is the dark side of love. When you wake up in the morning, it's the first thing that comes to your mind and the last thing to leave before you go to sleep, and all the time in between is completely consumed by misery and disappointment. I don't know how I got through finals period in this state of mind. I wish I could think of apt metaphors without trivializing suffering I haven't experienced, but failed love should feel very much like Jose Aldo kicking your balls over and over. The worst part is that even as you are getting kicked in the balls, you don't quite have the self-discipline to throw in the white towel because you have this tiny bit of hope that somehow the reality you are experiencing is not really how it is, and it could all change for the better at an instant. Love, and failed love, fully exploits our lovely capacity to believe what we want even as we know our thinking to be false. Personally, I have found that these moments of intense agony are also the moments when I turn into an absolutely horrible human being. I wallow in self-pity and self-loathing, and allow jealousy, malice, and irrational thinking to color my actions. I isolate myself from rest of the world and become unusually aggressive, almost like a cornered animal. And really, I am speaking only for myself. I have no clue if other guys have heartbreaks this bad because as Common says, we are taught to hold it in and not talk about it. Sometimes I wonder if girls even know about it.

After having experienced this prolonged suffering twice, I feel I've lost a little chunk of me each time. And every time I hear their names or see their statuses pop up on Facebook, there is an immediate gut reaction I can't quite describe. My mind recoils as though I am confronting my phobia, and all the pain comes rushing back again, not in vivid memories but a dull bleakness. But at the same time, I remember the purity of the love I experienced and somehow, that will make me love them for the rest of my life.

So what is my conclusion after all this? Everyone has a fundamental need to be loved. It is as fundamental a need as food or shelter. But the dynamics of provision are complex. We can love others but we can't force them to love us, and it is crushing when those we love don't return it. Our ego can't stand it. So we try to make others love us and fail, or run away from it, telling ourselves we don't need love. But eventually, it will either make or break us, I think. We have many avenues for feeling loved - or simply distracting ourselves - along the way but they are rarely as fulfilling or long-lived as that soul connection with the significant other. I'm not sure if followers of religions would ever be satisfied only with love they receive from the divine creator. Buying fresh clothes and a nice car can boost our ego, but even if they serve as expedient means for reaching out to prospective love interests, they ultimately can't buy us the special mental connection we desire. I'm sure Lady Gaga will want to settle down with someone (with all her poker-facing and muffin-bluffing, who knows if it'll be a guy or a girl) even as she continues to produce music and get a lot of love from fans. Krump dancers who go hard get pumped up by the homies but my man Solow will eventually look for a soulmate too. As for me, I have finally found what makes me happy and jolts me out of my apathy. But even if I tried, I couldn't force myself to love for the hope of being loved in return. Only thing I can do is wait patiently for the years to pass and the pain to wash away, and I might allow myself to catch feelings again. For those of you who are in relationships and happy, make sure to treasure that shit! I can't tell you how hard it is for two people to agree on anything.