Saturday 14 April 2012

What is love?


Here’s something that I have learned in the past three months, about the true meaning of love.

Three months ago The Human hit a low patch, which we’re not close to being out the other side of; my deguchums from the Twitterverse will be familiar with this. When “The Other Human” became “He That Left” I had a humanbean who did a lot of crying and, if I’m honest, not a lot of housework and not a lot of taking care of herself either.

During those darkest days in January I didn’t tweet. It was better that way. If I had tweeted, chances were I would have said something I shouldn’t have done, something unkind or something bitter on her behalf. I might have written about the emotional pain she experiences which is so raw that she feels it physically, about how she feels like there is a scream stuck in her throat, about the clawing desperation she has to change the way things have turned out. I might have tweeted someone’s mobile number or their e-mail address so that my – fantastically loyal, it has to be asserted – twitterchums could ask him the questions that he will not answer in the hope that maybe he would take the calls of another, read the e-mails or texts of another.

The only thing I tweeted was this—

Am working very hard trying to keep The Human from being so sad. Sorry if I don't tweet as much. Normal service will resume soon. Hopefully.

The Human then switched off the laptop and put it away. For a period of about three weeks she didn’t check her e-mail or facebook. However, I checked mine regularly.

I am so glad that I did because, in all honesty, I think that my twitterchums helped keep her alive and moving in those darkest and most hurty days.

What I received, on a daily basis, were so many tweets and direct messages from people asking if The Human was okay, offering words of support and advice. In one case there was even the offer of vigilante services, but I think – I hope – that may have been a joke!

Twitter – more particularly, my twitter – became The Human’s lifeline as she watched the number of tweets that I received which asked after her, which sent their love. People even tweeted their mobile numbers and e-mail addresses with offers of support. The Human felt touched at the patience and the love that my deguchums showed her. She is the first to acknowledge how difficult it is to deal with people who are impossibly melancholic.

So here’s my question. What is love? That is, after all, the subject of this particular piece.

Let’s look at how The Human has felt in the past three months, waking up in the mornings and feeling fine for a split second before she remembers it all, and before she wishes that she just hadn’t woken up at all. On these days her big victory is getting into the car because it means she has managed to dress and leave the house.

People say that time heals all wounds, but this doesn’t help. Time just takes her further away from it, from him, a thought which panics her, that she is moving further away from perfect days where she had wished that time would stop so that she could be in those moments forever. There is also the hideous fear that the further she gets from those days the more she will forget, the less she will remember, and that hurts just as much. On these days the emotional pain is physical, and she thinks about how she can't live like this for much longer. Why? Because she feels like her reason for living, the hope for a future, is gone.

She tries to think about the bad memories so that she can blame him, so that she can hate him, but all this does is remind her that there were no bad times, that all her memories are good. What does this do but cause her to wonder what happened that could have broken up something so perfect and so beautiful, something so precious to her, something that she believed would one day be the realisation of all of her silly, girlish dreams.

What torments her is that she doesn’t know, still, what caused it all to end. How he went away for a couple of weeks with friends and then, when returning simply sent a message which read that it “might be better” if they spoke no more and which wished her “good luck”. An impersonal, empty message that she won’t delete because it’s the last communication she has. Is she wrong to wonder? Is she wrong to be confused by this refusal to talk, to reply to either of the text messages she has sent since, and the odd juxtaposition between this and the fact that he hasn’t deleted her from Facebook, Skype or MSN? The truth is that she will not log into any of these because when she sees he is online too and yet he doesn’t talk to her it is like a stab through the heart and a punch in the stomach.

She now wonders if they were in totally different places. That she alone saw a future for them and he did not.

She thinks about why he hates her, and she assumes he does. She assumes that he blames her. That he blames her for telling him once when very drunk that she wondered if she felt more for him than he did for her. She wonders if he blamed her for how he felt guilty over not being able to commit to her and yet how she never made his life difficult about how there couldn't be more for a while. Did he blame her for being patient and for supporting the fact that his job came first instead of being jealous of it?

She spends hours thinking about how she doesn’t want to think about how wrong she got it or how she could have handled it better, differently. She hates that the only person she’s ever felt that connection with is someone she couldn't be with because of their incompatible geographies and a job that will one day end, because, let’s face it, they all do. She hates that he hates her and she doesn't know why.

Or does he not hate her? Does he just feel nothing. She wonders this and then cries, because the only thing worse than him hating her is the hideous thought that maybe she meant nothing at all to him really. But then she reflects on how he got all teary eyed that time when he said it might not work out, when he said he couldn't bear getting involved for it all to end. That it would all end when she got fed up with it and walked away. And yet she didn't. She hasn’t. She never will. The truth is, she will always be here for him if he turns around and comes back again.

Then, she wonders, is she just expendable? Does she not matter? Is she not worth having? Worth keeping? Is she not worth investing in? She wishes that she could hate him and she despises herself for not being able to see him in a negative way at all. She probably should, but she knows that he is a good person and that, for him to walk, she must be truly a dreadful person who has done something really, really awful.

Then, one evening, a friend of hers turned up on the doorstep with a large bag of Chinese food. The two of them sat on the drawing room floor by my cage and ate the lot. And without offering me so much as a nibble of a prawn-cracker, but let’s not get bogged down in bitter trivia.

When they had finished eating, they talked about how gluttonous they felt. Which they might not have done had they shared the Chinese love with me at all, but never mind. They decided that they needed to exercise more. Neither of them wanted to exercise on their own, they needed company so that they would feel less like the one Michelin Man at the back of the room hiding behind all of the lycra clad gods and goddesses so that no one would see their rippling fat rolls for all the rippling pectorals. So they started going to Zumba and to the gym together. Because two heads are better than one and it’s easier to stay on track when you have a true friend on side to laugh at yourself with.

So, for all of you out there who are looking for “The One” and who are disappointed because you haven’t found them yet, I say stop. Stop! Look around you; look at the people who support you and who care about you because, here’s a flash, this is love. The people who are there for you at 4am when you a crying into your pillow? These are the loves of your life. Maybe it was He That Left who was The One for The Human, maybe not, but what is certain is the powerful truth that I have learned here. If anything I am shocked that it took so much heartache and misery for me to learn this one lesson.

What is this lesson?

That I have an incredibly supportive and caring network of people who are there for me when it feels like the world is ending, when, as Victor Hugo once wrote, “whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees”. I am blessed to have such people who stood, tweeted and telephoned by me during the very worst of times. This is love. Yus.

2 comments:

  1. I've spent the last 7 years recovering from a broken heart. What a lovely blog. My friends have been great too.
    It's unbelievable the pain isn't it?
    Sending lots of love.
    Real love!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The worst part is that feeling that you're the only one and that you won't survive it. But the truth is that you do and that you will; you keep getting up in the mornings and, even though you feel like a zombie at first, one day you realise that you haven't cried yet.
      Thank you for your kind words and I hope, truly hope, that you are feeling better soon. Real love, x

      Delete