notes on being loved
postcard 36: on various fragments on love and being loved, and the push / pull of romance
FEBRUARY
i think about what it means to be loved a lot. i’ve had brief stints that feel too cursory to call a relationship, like the on and off nature and the emotional distance like a tunneled candle, horrendous evidence that the ignited flame never once melted the wax all the way through. i think about how never once in my twenty something years have i met someone that makes me feel like, yes i can imagine spending the rest of my life with you and yes i can imagine waking up next to your face forever and it’s not so terrifying. when i close my eyes and think about the past men that i have been romantically linked with, i can only imagine their facial features like a picasso painting and their voices like radio static cutting through it. nothing is whole, everything is fleeting, and i feel alone.
maybe it’s because i’ve become so good at being alone. i think about being in a long term relationship and i feel claustrophobic. my friends tell me that it’s because i haven’t met the right person yet, that i’ll know it when i know it and that i shouldn’t worry because i have the whole expanse of my life stretched ahead of me. maybe that’s the case. i don’t know. i think about how much i value my solitude and then i think about how much i yearn to be loved the way people write about in books, and it feels like cognitive dissonance. it sort of feels like a fantasy, because that can’t exist, right? if i’ve felt every emotion on the spectrum but not that, it can’t be real, right?
APRIL
technicality wise, i don’t think that never feeling that way about a person would truly have an effect on my life. i’m already self sufficient and hyper independent, a well oiled machine. success has always been about numbers for me because that’s how i measure myself, how i become measurably and quantifiably good in this world; i project these numbers in the sky like they’ll matter enough and anyone but me will care. i don’t think anyone does, because that truly doesn’t matter at the end of my life.
in my twenties, my life is filled with friends and platonic love in every corner, sometimes overwhelmingly so. i’m a social person and i’m good at socializing, at least i think i am. i care and love my friends fiercely and i try to be good at sharing things about myself even when it starts to feel like a tug of war and not regret it after. i have an army of people i can call if something in my life goes wrong, but maybe for the first time, i’m looking past the rubble of a disaster, and trying to find someone, and they’re not there. not even a figment of my imagination, because how do i imagine something i’ve never experienced?
MAY
my best friend also tells me that the guys i choose to pursue and be interested in feels like a form of self harm to her, especially because i keep choosing these guys when i’m knee deep in a depressive episode. the men i like feel cookie cutter. works in finance, definitely belonged to a frat in college, thinks self help books are the pinnacle of the world.
in hindsight, i wonder if i go out of my way to choose a guy so different from me so that he’ll never be able to understand me, or even have that capability or kindness of empathy. and because i’ll always be able to hold him at arms length for our whole relationship, to run first and have that as the excuse. because if he feels like someone i could truly love, and someone who sees through me, i won’t be able to have that out. i’ll have to love him, and i think i would want to desperately.
maybe i want someone to see through me, to really get me, and help me try to understand myself in return. i have such a fear of opening up and i don’t know why. i think i’m scared that i’ll begin to lose pieces of myself if i fall in love. but at the same time, i want to be able to love someone so much that i don’t mind losing pieces of myself in order to tetris his. i think i’m capable of it.Â
AUGUST
i usually end up not really caring about the fact that i don’t have anyone to introduce as a boyfriend, because i’m so busy with work and my life that i don’t even know where i’d fit a boyfriend in my life. i imagine my life as a sort of airtight jar—it’s so jam packed, but it’s jam packed well that nothing really escapes it. i make opportunities for myself with what i have in the jar. but if i try to pry it open to let something new in, i’m scared everything else will dissipate into thin air. i’m scared for it to be something more. something more that i could lose.
have i been thinking that i’ve been moving at super speed, while in reality i haven’t been moving at all? i feel like the antithesis of a plane, which my grandmother explained to me when i was younger that it moves so fast it looks like it’s not really moving at all when airborne. have i been the opposite of that? rejecting every opportunity that heads my way because i’m scared it’s going to wreck what i already have?
SEPTEMBER
i never like crushes, mainly because they feel like a waste of time and energy. they never last for me anyway, and all it seems to do is form the worst sense of anticipatory dread in the pit of my stomach and make me malleable property in someone else’s hands. for a brief month or so, i feel myself wanting to disassemble and change part of myself, and that feels terrifying to me. it never matters, anyway. none of my crushes will ever be real or viable after they tell me that they like me back—the emotional disconnect will become real, replacing the oxygen in the room, and my feelings, my crush, will slowly become nonexistent. is that sad? maybe, but it’s just the way i am. no adjustment necessary.
NOVEMBER
i had a horrifically perfect weekend. it was spontaneous and deeply romantic, which are two words i would never use to describe my life at all. we walked around the city, amid the picturesque landscape. autumn had arrived soundlessly overnight. leaves turned beautiful hues of crimson and orange and yellow and red. brownstones scattered the streets we walked on. maybe the backdrop itself was enough for me to romanticize or over-romanticize the three days i spent with him, or maybe it was the fact that this was the first guy i was interested in that didn’t feel like, in the words of my best friend, a form of self harm.
it’s easy to romanticize it, i think. or maybe it was that romantic. hindsight bias is terrifying, and i can’t fully process what i felt in that moment in retrospect, but i think it was the closest it felt to what people write about in books—something that has felt so fantastical and surreal to me; like a ghost of a feeling i’ve been chasing my entire life, or that has been haunting me. the beauty for me, for him as well, lay in the ephemerality of it—the fact that everything felt fleeting and elusive, like the hourglass had flipped and the sand had already started slipping through my fingers before i even registered.
maybe that’s why the things that chase me like a ghost in my apartment are the small details of it all. the way i’d trace his smile and he’d grab my hand and kiss my palm. the way he’d let me drone on and on and on, talking his ear off about the most trivial things. the way i’d wake up in his arms, feeling like i belonged there, an illusion that we’d do this day in and day out for the rest of our lives. the way we could talk for hours and hours and still have something new to talk about. the way his eyes would light up whenever he was telling me about a book he loved. i never enjoyed the smell of cigarettes, but by the end of the three days, i sought familiarity in it.
prior to seeing him, i had told one of my friends that this felt completely new for me, enjoying the feeling of liking someone. i told her for the first time, i wouldn’t care how this ended, because this showed me that i was capable of feeling this way i previously was not aware of. and rather than every guy feeling like a temporary existence in my life, that it was possible to even feel this way and actually enjoy it. i couldn’t find the usual emotional distance or the desire to run away when things started becoming reciprocated and mutual. i had always loved the thrill of the chase more, but this was a thrill i had never experienced in my life before. maybe it was because we were so similar in ways i didn’t even think was possible, he and i. all my life i had gone for guys who could not even begin to understand me, and here was one who felt like a mirror and parallel of me. on the last day, as we sat on a bench and watched the sun dip beneath the horizon on the lake, he told me the same thing i had told my friend a week ago. the capability and the capacity to feel this way was real. we simply hadn’t known that it was.
we lived on different sides of the world, and we both agreed that the three days we spent were all we were going to get. you’re my friend before anything. we’d have three days to ourselves, and then we’d go back to just being friends. maybe the weekend was so perfect, felt straight out of a film or a fairytale, that the entire seventy two hours felt intangible and illogical in a way. on the last day, i told him that if this was the right place at the right time, he would be the one person i could see myself falling in love with. you’re my friend before anything. it’s still true. i never lost him. i still care deeply for him. i know he does for me. but when i think about watching him walk away from me, how much my chest hurt to see the places he had been in my apartment, i regret not chasing after him. i miss this version of him like a phantom limb, something that i’m afraid i’ll never have again or don’t know if i want to because i’m terrified it won’t be the same, even if i see him again. or maybe i’m terrified that it will.
i’m sure in a while, maybe a long while, this will all fade, this too shall pass. but i don’t know if i want it to. i want to selfishly preserve it, to not tell anyone about it, because it was our moment and will be our moment forever. i also want to keep talking about it, to never let the perfect moment die, but maybe that’s selfish and not fair to either of us because we’ll never have it again. but everything is fine. it really is. spring always comes after a winter.
DECEMBER
i think about what it means to be loved a lot. to tell someone that i love them without thinking twice, for the words feel as easy as breathing. i want to see someone and feel my heart physically swell at how much i adore them. i want love to feel easy, like a melody i’ve always known in the back of my mind, a missing puzzle that had been right under my hand, a constant that had maybe held me anchored my entire life, stars that had always hung above my head but just arranged itself into a constellation. i want to love someone for the rest of my life and be loved for the rest of my life without any transaction. i want love to feel like opening a dogeared page of my favorite book.
in the darkness of my room, i say it once, twice, like a prayer. i want to love someone. i want to be loved.
the way you articulate the emotions and feelings is everything. i’m so in love with your writing elle. this post is so beautiful and relatable and heartbreaking and healing and so inspiring.
Absolutely breathtaking, and like reading my own journal. Such a common feeling, but you write it in such a revolutionary way I can feel the fear of vulnerability dripping off the page. Just brilliant.