I am incapable of love and otherwise leery of it and think sometimes about it. Love as we come to understand love, or as I did, anyway. Some hybrid model of abuse and Hollywood idealism. Maybe that didn't help me with love at all, maybe it just fucked me up.
After 9-11, the famous one, I thought a LOT about love. There were that day many final phone calls, a good chunk of them simple "I love You"s. What I got stuck on was that many of those I Love You's were between people who'd maybe been fighting that morning, or were thinking about divorce, or were otherwise not too into their relationship, yet at THAT moment, no greater, better, clearer set of words, just three, each simple, were more qualified than I Love You. This fascinated me for years, and then I got it.
The imperfection of language, something we hear about around the edges but we always seem to find the words. The simple ones, too. There's a whole other realm of words that require dictionaries and that we never use, we almost always manage to find the right combination of simpler fare that gets us close enough. Except when a plane just landed under your 96th floor office and now you're going to die. We never came up with that word, the word or words for that.
The ubiquitous experiences are easy. We can pretty much agree on what "happy" is because enough of us experience what it implies to assign it that word with its attached meaning (with some vested trust: I see blue and you see blue and we agree on the thing we are both seeing as blue but in my brain this thing that you see as blue may be what I see as red. Everything red could be blue. But that's an improbable trifle or maybe just a scene from Animal House). Our urges or confusions or impulses, our darknesses, experiences less shared, more obscure; music or art take over, picking up the slack language can't or doesn't carry.
Connection was about to cease, everything in a life that connects one to the very concept, definition of LIFE. Everything that makes us human, that defines our very existence, all that we are, the physical, emotional, spiritual matter of US - connected to this world, both broad and personal. It was about to be broken, to end. Abrubtly, violently, finally. They had no time. Three simple, monosyllabic words to covey this moment in the void of how to convey this moment. "I love you," they said.
So that I think about love-as-connection.
So that I think about connection-as-love, when I think about my family, childhood, life. My mother, my father, three brothers, me. So little connection.
I think about my PTSD Bookends, the first at four years old, and I think that was when I stopped. I:fully. I ceased to be. What in that could ever be my security? Who had my back? Where could I feel safe? Or cared for, about? Connection ended that day, that moment. Love ended.
BUT: I can't disallow that I am genetically incapable of love, that any incident aside maybe I just lack the love gene. Maybe there is no connection because I'm narcissistic. Narcissism and childhood trauma, hand-in-hand, skipping into the sunset. Even the weeds are bored.
Is this us? All of us, what we all walk around with all the time? We play out our daily lives anyway? We have breakfast, go to work, tell a joke, drive the kid to practice, pick up some milk, watch Squid Game, dream about vacation? The actions of a day that play out over our silent internal soundtracks? Day after day? What are we not talking about? Why aren't we talking about it? Why aren't we talking to each other? Connecting?
