No, don't get me wrong. I have a duo of beautiful sisters (ultimately younger than me and so untouched by the cares and worries that plague me) and amazingly supportive friends. But I have this superstitious taboo of speaking aloud my hopes, dreams and fears. I keep a notebook on my bedside table for this instead, dark ink spilling across the pages with my thoughts scrawled with disregard for margins.
(It could be said that margins are unnecessary anyway, why limit myself?)
Sometimes, I find myself taut and stretched tight like the E string on a violin (held in place, gripped with the littlest finger; climbing up almost to the bridge, sounding a note close to the third octave above middle C).
At other times, I feel my bones drape languidly, restful as a calm puddle in the aftermath of a thunderstorm (still, ripples non-existent, giving into sensation only when there is a lack of stimulation; paradox, irony).
Through it all, my thoughts remain a maelstrom. A terrifying whirlpool of intensity. A lying mess. The repetitive but unpredictable Brownian motion of words leaving trails across my mind.
“There are too many other inexplicable things around us--horrors, threats, mysteries that draw you in and then inevitably disenchant you. Back to the predictable and humdrum. The prince is never going to come, everybody knows that; and maybe Sleeping Beauty's dead.”
I understand that I stand apart, eccentric in an incomprehensible sense to everyone else around me. Standing apart inevitably leads to standing alone. Being alone results in a freedom unlike any other (my mind descending and ascending to levels unknown- never on the same wavelength as anyone else but never having to be either), but occasionally it does bring me to loneliness.
No, this is not a teenage rant on heartbreak or love or romance.
No, this is not an asexual cry for companionship.
Neither is this a pseudo-intellectual gripe about the oh-so-thoughtless fools I am surrounded by.
This is wondering: Does being different detract from your chances at the Russian roulette game that is love? (Why is love so important that people would kill, fight wars, bloody history, smear the actions of mankind with fathomless evil in the name of something that is universally regarded as fundamentally good?)
Cynical. Enigmatic. Pessimistic. Cryptic. I dance a clumsy tango around the subject that seduces me with one hip cocked and puckered lips.
Oxytocin. Serotonin. Human evolution. Proven by science, anthropology and history.
Skin meets skin, a rush of adrenaline, fumbled sentences, a compilation of clichés and stereotypes. From the calm and steady romance of Pride and Prejudice (“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”) to the insane selfishness of Wuthering Heights (“May she wake in torment!" he cried, with frightful vehemence, stamping his foot, and groaning in a sudden paroxysm of ungovernable passion. "Why, she's a liar to the end! Where is she? Not there—not in heaven—not perished—where? Oh! you said you cared nothing for my sufferings! And I pray one prayer—I repeat it till my tongue stiffens—Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”) what are we but pawns to our invention, our creation? The emotion we esteem above all others? That which we have raised on a pedestal over the millennia, until fact and fiction have blurred to become one.
Society has become what we have made of it and love is our twisted, crippled child.
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