“I haven’t even touched you,” she said. “But I know that I love you.”
Maybe it’s the fact that we shit the same way that made us being soulmates more tenable—if we were to believe in that kind of thing anyway. I’m unsure exactly when I realized that I would be spending the rest of my life with her, but I know that she loves me too much for me to ever want to break her heart. And I love her too.
This will easily go down as the sappiest thing I’ve written here, if not for the honesty and simplicity that love-writing demands—anything more sensational would be repulsive, at least to those who are my age, sitting somewhere in their twenties. But I suppose everything I write here (tagline: On Love, Death, and Politics) is about love. You see, the older we get the less sappy we are, like when we were 16. I’m mainly referring to the boys here—I’m cynical enough to know that the girls who already had a body count over a handful were on a path to reject every love letter that would come their way from a boy that really liked them (although he shouldn’t have, and probably did because he had no reason to). Sounds exactly like me, actually.
I spent most of my formative years writing poems and letters to girls—some who reciprocated, others who did not—before I realized that romance is exclusionary; it works with the “right” one, but it is not an attitude to carry over daily with a multitude. Because life abounds in disappointment; and when it comes to love, there is no surer way to cynicism than by rejection. (I do believe there is a way to circumnavigate rejection, and find people that you do belong to, but that is a sociological prognosis that will be released soon enough, hopefully. For now, refer to Acquaintanceship that can serve as a guide for navigating your social relationships).
Anyway, here I am at almost 26 years old, fast approaching 30, and have realized, as she lies asleep next to me and yet thousands of miles away, what I have always held close to my heart: Love is a choice. Except there’s a caveat: it also isn’t. Love can find you serendipitously in the strangest of places as though God himself awoke from his slumber of nothingness and blessed you, a leviathan, with an angel; and yet, in the same way that you can lose the grace of God in a fit of sin, she can slip from your life if you choose to let her go.
It might suffice to say that she is not a whore that fills a man with lust that he might interpret as “I like her.” She is the mother of his children who would be buried next to him and wait until her own death to be so, even should it be the next 30 years, because that’s her “true love.”
She often asks me why I love her, and the best reason I could give is that I’m comfortable with her. She is my friend. She loves me. It is as natural to love her as it is to breathe, unconsciously and without effort—except, of course, for the caveat that one must make the effort to not fuck up and sometimes, to remind himself to love truly those who love you.
A religiously inaccurate, but representative quote I grew up with:
“The Buddhists say if you meet somebody and your heart pounds, your hands shake, your knees go weak, that’s not the one. When you meet your ‘soul mate’ you’ll feel calm. No anxiety, no agitation.”
Soulmates
Good job of explaining the inexplicable, if this honest compliment makes sense