Love and marriage (stream of consciousness)

what the hell is love, and what does it have to do with marriage? What does it have to do with life in general?
for years I've sort of assumed that love is what life is all about and that marriage is like the ultimate manifestation of love. Pretty big romantic ideas i think. But really, how much does romance even have to do with it? Does it matter? love, marriage, romance. All three - things that are pretty independent of each other.

You can have marriage without romance, or marriage without love. (Nauseous emoji)
You can have love and/or romance without marriage.
You can have romance without love.
And certainly you can have love without romance.

I think we can, right away, write off romance as pretty meaningless. Like the icing flowers on wedding cake. They're nice and all, but that's not what it's about. (Romance is often the easiest part of life. The feeling of "being in love" the act of "falling in love" and the idea of "the one" are all ideas that exist under the umbrella I'll call "romance." It's what movies portray and of what we get little tastes when we meet someone new and exciting. most everyone knows that this doesn't last forever. As hard as you might try, it eventually fades into a memory. In fact, often the harder you try to preserve this, the more quickly it disappears.
So if the idea of love and marriage are all wrapped up in romance, there might be trouble in paradise sooner than later.)

Marriage is the thing that stumps around 50% (so I'm told) of us. And I'm not going to pretend to not be completely mistified by it. Marriage is, by all accounts surveyed, maybe the hardest thing in life. It's about taking two things and melding them into one thing. Like when you mix oil and water, you need a special tool to emulsify them. And you have to constantly emulsify them otherwise they will eventually separate. Either that or you have to introduce a chemical that physically changes one or both of them to permanently emulsify them. Sounds like marriage to me right? Like you have to constantly work to stay emulsified. In and of itself, marriage seems to be able to be simplified to this concept of work. So marriage by itself is just another job.

That leaves love. The most elusive of them all. "Love is a thing that you can't define."
The harder i try the more nebulous it becomes. It seems to be something like "happiness" or "the meaning of life" in that you can't find it, it has to find you. But it also must be the missing factor in the marriage job and the fleeting romance. Perhaps the thing that ties them all together.

"Love is hard, but life is harder."

Maybe it's got something to do with choosing a person who you want to do the work with, who you want to fight through life with. And you make a marriage out of it, and find romance hiding in the corners and the cracks.

small packages (;

it seems like sometimes words are just words.
sometimes they mean nothing and sometimes they mean a lot.
words are little packages that we wrap our thoughts and feelings in and ship them out to people hoping they can open the box and peer inside.

words can seem personally meaningful at the moment, and then months pass and looking back on those words seems like someone else said them.

when you tell someone you'll never leave them.
then you leave them, and have to reflect on those words.
when you say "sorry"
then months later, you forgot what you were sorry about.

but there are some words that occasionally stand solid through changing scenery.
like when i say things like "i love the river."
those words have always been true.

maybe the key to love is to find people who's chosen words
weather the seasons.
so you can wrap your insides in three little boxes "i love you"
and it will always mean a lot
always true.

(this one's angry)

"she just doesn't use her brain to think for herself," he said as he repeated the words he heard his father say over and over again.

every four years this political scene erupts on the face of this country like deep cystic acne. and each time it is worse than before.

hell, i don't know. maybe harmony only exists in tension. maybe in order for there to be balance, we need to be opposed in viewpoints. but i do know one thing:

everyone is small-minded. no one thinks for themselves.

maybe we should all just shut our loud, fucking mouths for one goddamn second and look in the mirror long enough to ask ourselves why #hatetrumpslove in our own minds. why it's so easy for us to look right past the plank in our own eye and point out the damage the other person is going to cause driving with that piece of wood stuck in their eye.

jesus people! get over yourselves. you're no better than that asshole you're criticizing.

your shit stinks too. i guarantee it.

comfort (loneliness: the most comfortable companion)

i listen to radiohead sing

"everything, everything, everything,
in its right place. in its right place."

and i put all my pieces in their appropriate places. and it feels like cliche, but also rings true in my ears. i wonder why everything feels like it's in its right place only when i lay my head down at night and nothing, no one, is there because i've put everything, everyone, away. i wonder why, so often, the only feeling that feels real is loneliness. why the loneliest space is the most comfortable one.

it feels like a cruel joke. to have bound the two together inside a soul. inside a person, both the longing for a thing and a strong aversion to it in adjacent heartbeats.

rafiki

"look harder..."
"you see, he lives in you"

at once i felt a comfort and an ache.

i was on the elliptical in the gym minding my own thoughts, when something made me smile - a genuine smile. the kind you feel on your face and in your guts.

just then i caught my own glance in the mirror across the room and my heart stuttered a little bit. because for a split second, i saw my dad. smiling back at me. through the bearded mouth and the smile that kind of turns down. through the eyes that were bright and deep.

an idea(l)

i've come to... an idea.
and that is that love is truly the most important gift we're given in life. it is the highest form of human experience - the most important thing in life. maybe it's even the much debated "point."

but love is kind of like perfection.
we can experience moments. glimpses. and we're driven to pursue it, but as long as we're alive and human, it's an impossible goal.
this is so because

love is the absence of selfishness.

and as long as we are human, we are, in our deepest layers, selfish. it's in our nature to be self-centered. in this way, it's much like trying to be perfect, and sometimes feels like climbing a greased pole. maybe this is why love feels so elusive - why many of us become jaded and turn our backs on the pursuit. when we try and "fail" and are tempted to believe that our failure indicates something about love itself rather than about our own humanness. perhaps this is the reason it seems so fleeting. indeed, impossible.

but it's far from futile. maybe if love itself is the highest form of human experience, then the pursuit of love is the most noble of all human endeavors.

"love is for the fighter,
born to lose but never quit.
swinging for the moon in the water." - dawes

rain / breathe

when you live down here,
you learn something about tenacity.
day after day you press through the searing
when your eyes burn and blur
and your lungs feel like poison.

when frustration moves your soul
feels just out of reach when you need closeness
feels like no room to be, when space is what you need

but you keep living.
you keep straining to see the mountains

because one day it rains.
and just for a moment, you can breath
you can fill up your lungs
and it doesn't burn.