I get this sadness when I see something beautiful
– I want to make it a part of me, I want to capture it, keep it, be
assured that I will never lose it. I want it to love me as much as I
love it. “It” could be a person, or a work of art, a story, a
character – something which I find lovely. I get it with people and
art, mostly. With people, I want them to love me. With art, I want to
be capable of creating the same thing, or want to already HAVE
created the very same thing, because that is the best way I can think
of owning it: getting credit for it and having the sole right over
it. I see something, and it resonates with me, and I get jealous. Or
I see someone, and I want them, and I get jealous. I think that I
can't have beautiful, kind people, or make good, beautiful art. And
when I look at these things I don't have, the don't-have-right-now's
and the didn't-have-yesterday's combine to form this formidable
pattern which I don't want to look at. Because I'm afraid of finding
a meaning in that pattern: that I'm unlovable, unworthy, unwanted,
and not enough. That I will NEVER have these things, even though
really, what does HAVING mean? What does it mean to HAVE something?
I
suppose giving metaphorical birth to art is like "having" it: everyone
agrees that it's yours and you get ownership and rights over it and
you can change it or destroy it or look at it forever if that's what
you want and it will always stay the same until dust and rust and
decay get to it, but by then you will hopefully be long dead if you
ever really liked the thing in the first place. But the same is never
true for a person. You can never really have a person, which is
perhaps why it's so frustrating to be in relationship with other
people: things you can own and control. People you can't. You
can never win someone's approval without doing something first to win
it: you can't buy their trust, their confidence, their love, their
loyalty, or the look of fondness in their eye from across the room.
It's all given freely, which is at once both wonderful and
frustrating. We want some kind of assurance, some concreteness to it
all, which is why we make promises about forever and buy wedding
rings crusted with unbreakable rocks, all in some attempt to force a
sense of solidity, to cement something somewhere in the ethereal
world of shifting emotions and changing desire. But it doesn't work.
For all our promises, and for all it feels like we will love them
forever and they us, relationships always fall apart: not because of
some depressing doom-and-gloom pessimism kick, but because we're
people, we're creatures of time, and we have ups and downs. We
change. So we are not always going to feel love for one another:
eventually, it will wear out. And then if we dare, we will have to
start it all over again, fall in love with them again, or drift
apart. We can do either, if we choose, but the one thing we cannot do
is remain the same way and feel the same way about someone else
forever. It must change, because there is no way for it not to.
