I’m not scared.
I’m not scared anymore, about whether or not you love me too.
It sounds odd, I know.
Somehow, I think that love is different for me. I wish I could explain what I mean because often times I’m not sure that any of it makes sense.
It began in stages.
Unlike the others, I knew you. It was like I already knew you. That was the difference. And it was all the difference in the world to me.
If and when it turns out that you don’t love me, or you think you don’t love me, or you decide that you don’t, or don’t want to love me, then I have lost nothing.
It doesn’t scare me because I already expect it.
Now, in the state that I am in, I can only be pleasantly surprised.
What sense does it make for me to pretend that I am someone that I am not — someone who isn’t ever needy or lonely, someone without quirks or a few unhealthy habits; someone who isn’t messy at all, someone who is perfectly organized, someone who can imagine doing something other than teaching and writing about ideas.
Do I wish that I was ignorant and didn’t have to think so much?
No. Then again, the question has always been nonsensical to me. If I didn’t think so much I wouldn’t be me, by definition. By my own definition at least.
The only reason that I can know that there are other options is because I see both sides.
I see what it is to be happy and I see what it is to be miserable. The miserable times make the good times better.
If I was ignorant and only had good times, those good times would not be as good as they are if I did not feel the pain, the emptiness of despair at other times.
It is a choice, perhaps, between: feeling intensely good occasionally and intensely bad much of the time versus feeling ok most of the time and not-so-ok at other times.
Between these choices I choose the first.
But maybe I choose the first because I have never felt what it is to live a life like the second.
We justify the things that we already have.
Even if I realize this, so what? I shouldn’t regret something that cannot be changed and couldn’t have been changed to begin with. Regret is nonsensical.
Maybe my love for you is a projection; I want to love someone, so I imagine that you love me, so that, in return, I love myself more.
This allows me to view myself from someone else’s perspective, but of course, that perspective is my own projection of what I would want someone else’s perspective to be of me, if that person loved me.
That projection is my ideal of me — the things that I love about myself.
If the person that I want to love me doesn’t love me in return, I know that they didn’t see me in the way that I see me, and that person is no longer the person that I love now, by definition.
It works out well, you see.
