Chapter 10 Oscar's Truth

"We mortals, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" - Eliot

Ernest Hemingway once said: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” And the only person I seem too proud to take advice from is myself, nevermind celebrated authors, (whether or not he is an alcoholic coward is negligible at this point, because the man is famous for a reason). So this is it: true love can only exist if you love someone for who they are, not who you want them to be or imagine they can become. Think of how parents love. It was an epiphany I’d had recently. It seems simple enough, obvious even, right? But think of someone you profess to love: are there things that you would change? This applies to your mother, your little brother, your cat (even though really  no one should ever love cats, terrible animals). Even yourself. My entire childhood I’ve been told by my father that love is a pattern of actions: decisions we make every day. Maybe that’s true too; however, it isn’t the truest sentence I know. Oddly enough, juxtaposition to the constant rambling of my father I was encouraged constantly by a flood of Disney movies espousing that love is a feeling -an immediate connection- fireworks in the head and the heart that drive you to the ends of ridiculousness and self-sacrifice. At this point I'm imagining a delightful redhead with a tail. Maybe that’s true as well, maybe, but it’s still not the truest sentence I know. 

I think it even applies to why we like people, even if they drive us crazy; this may in fact be the root of love, the very start. A like that runs around masquerading as a flaw, playing around in our peripherals, irritating us; one, that at first glance, cannot be categorized as a like at all. But if it was gone, something would be amiss. We love people because they drive us crazy. Maybe that seems backwards. I think it goes hand in hand with the part of the human condition that says we want what we can’t have (sanity apparently). There is something about, perhaps one person, that no one else can give us: even if it makes you want to throw your hands up in the hair and curse, say: “I’m through”. But you’ll be back. Because if you could get that from anywhere else, you would. But you can’t. Only that person has it, and I don’t know that we’d still like them if they didn’t. Only that person can drive you to that particular precipice of insanity (it is only available to a select group, kind of like a treasure map, but the X marks Milos Forman’s Psychiatric Ward and Jack Nicholas will not help you) and you wouldn’t want it any other way. Mamma Mia! Hell! Even ABBA knows. 

Only, we shouldn’t love people for what they can give us, or how they treat us, we should love them for the things that we can give them, and how we can treat them. We can give them our acceptance of perceived flaws. 

That had been the crux in my life regarding relationships thus far, platonic or not. Loving people is not wanting to change them, because they are fine, just as they are. Expectations I harbour have nothing to do with them. I had been fooled by myself and a self-glorifying society, where a cocaine rush is commensurate to the infatuation we call ‘love’, that being selfish in relationships was benign, that it was even good. Not just any kind of selfish, but the kind where we don’t think people are good enough for us because they don’t love us how we love, or expect to be loved. (This is a slippery slope because standards are important). I once read this quote, and pardon my bastardization but it says: Sometimes because others don’t love like we love, we grow afraid that it doesn’t exist. How someone else shows love outwardly is really not for us to reflect upon, because it’s not in our head. All you can do it act like a quality human being, whatever you think that is. It’s their prerogative, its yours. They’re special, I’m special -we are all in our own way, worthy of interest- why we need others to think so is absurd, maybe you want it, but by God, you don’t need it. Toss out validation. Just know that you are, and strive to be the best that you can be. (Wilde might tell you that everyone else is already taken). Maybe if you stop going about in life both worried about not being good enough and asking people to change so they’re good enough -so you can justify your love for them and just love who you love in their entirety one day someone can love you too: “Just as you are” (Mark Darcy BJD). Love you in a way that doesn’t need to be asked for, demanded even; where you wont have to beg or borrow their time. I know I wouldn’t want that. (I’ve been there, you don’t want that). Because people can be the reason for others to change. Some people even need to change (put the damn cap back on the toothpaste you disgrace to oral hygiene). But most everyone deserves to be loved for who they are, and thats the truest sentence I know.

We didn’t talk a lot that summer. I really wasn’t heroic about it. My demonstration of feministic independence was terrifically non-existent and I thought of him day after day, hoping he retained the feelings he communicated that night. That he’d still be my person. My imagination ran away on me. Every cryptic short message he sent me had me racking my brain for what he meant. His inability to every say anything to meant anything drove me insane. I wrote the above after I thought about it one evening at length. I had turned into something pathetic, someone I didn’t like. I wished I’d never met him but I knew if I was given 100 life times I wouldn’t take it back. I’m full of paradoxes. I had lost myself. 

You never know what its really like to lose yourself until you’ve done it. And theres no manual to getting it back.