Today's Journal About Love (kind of)

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.