So today, I am sitting here, on the floor of the
living room in my childhood home, with my laptop on my knees, listening to
Beethoven’s Allegreto Symphony no.7 in A major, OP.92 which I only know of
because I searched the King’s Speech OST (it’s the music playing when his
Majesty gives that speech through the radio at the end of the movie, wait, that
might be spoiler-ish? Ah well.) Contemplating love.
Didn’t see
that curveball coming didja?
Not really.
So last
year, I made a post on Valentine’s day (which
you can read here, if you so ever wish) and I think that I came across as being
rather cynical. I can’t help it, I am cynical. My default setting is sarcasm.
Which sometimes people don’t get and they think I’m just being mean, though
maybe they’re not that far of the mark. But would it really surprise you, if I
said, really, truthfully, I do have a romantic side.
Gasp and
call the Night Watch. Or something (incidentally, I do have all the Night Watch
books, I just have never read them. Maybe One Day).
It’s not
really news if I said I have not, ever, been in a relationship. I do moan and
groan and complain about it a lot and in several past posts. It’s nothing new.
But what if I said, that forever, I have wished for a love story so sweet, it
will give me eternal cavities.
In all clichéd
stories of life and love, my parents have known each other since form 1 in
secondary school. And I have wanted something as awesome as that. Though, as
you can probably deduce, that boat has sailed, been scuttled, and sunk into the
depths of the Forever Alone ocean of unrequited love tears. But dramatics and
run on sentences aside, yes, I do want to be loved. I do want an epic love
story.
Surprise. I
am, apparently, a little girl at heart.
But then, I
think, what is love? Why do people equate it with a heart, which, really doesn’t
even really look like a heart? Where do feelings come from? Why do people
always say, follow your heart, when last I knew the heart, which is made out of
special heart muscles, with special nerves, and special structures like fibers,
chords, and flaps, that all, somehow, work together in synchronicity to make
sure that we get the required amount of blood flowing through our vascular
system so that we don’t get tired while at rest (stage 4 cardiac failure
according to NYHA), does not, in any way, have any cognitive abilities. Making it
unable to make an informed decision. Unable, to even make a decision. And yet.
I have a
thing for run on sentences. It’s the common bane of all my English teachers.
They obviously have not succeeded in culling my penchant for writing long,
wordy nonsense. I have only deteriorated after my last English teacher in
Matriculation.
But back to
love. So? What is love. The scientist would say a mish-mash of various hormones
induced by specific conditions to make your pupils dilate, your heart palpitate
and a general feeling of warmness, maybe. Also, what happens when you get into
a fight or flight situation, except different hormones. I dunno. I’m
digressing.
I don’t
know why, but somehow, I have worked into cultivating a very hard exterior in
which, I am perceived as being, not romantic. I don’t read romance novels, I
think watching romantic movies is boring, and while my friends are all, this is
so sweet, that man is so romantic, I tell them that I have barfed a little in
my mouth while observing their exploits.
Once a
bunch of friends and I went book shopping. And among the books that ended up
being purchased by my friends was a book, written in a vaguely religious
manner, by a religiously educated person, on love. And marriage. And what we
should do in this beautiful, wonderful, sparkly institution known as marriage.
And I do not understand why she bought this particular book. So, in the ever ongoing quest to obtain more
knowledge, I asked her, why.
She said
that when you come to a certain age, you’ll start thinking about these things.
About growing up. I replied, but I’m the same age as you. We’re even born in
the same month. Maybe you’re just a late bloomer, she said. Have you got a
boyfriend Nona? She asked me. I said, no, unfortunately not. A look of
comprehension dawned on her face and she said, that’s why. You don’t have a
boyfriend Nona, so you don’t know how it feels. You haven’t felt the feeling of
being in love and being loved. You wouldn’t understand. I think the
conversation then went into tangents of how after I have fallen in love, I
would probably change. I don’t know what I’ll be, but apparently, one of them
would be a person who voluntarily reads self-help/motivation books on love and marriage
and the lovely, beautiful and sparkly institution that is marriage.
And I abhor
that answer so much so, because it makes me less human than her. And it is just
really me, but it also implies that after having fallen in love, I may turn
into a sycophantic human being who breaths and lives love and sentiment. Love
pushes through my veins, kinda shindig. And
I hate that.
I may have
never had a relationship but that does not mean that I have never been in love.
And yet, I still don’t see the draw of reading the self-help, sappy long winded
books of love, happiness and marriage genre.
The easy
and oft used argument is of course, to each his own. And the more complex
argument might include debates on child development, Sigmund Freud vs Erik
Ericsson’s modules, nature vs nurture and maybe a long winded and completely
illogical argument on why raspberry ripple will always top vanilla on the most
awesome flavor for ice-cream in existence. But whichever way you say it, I
think that in the end, love is so much more, marriage is so much more, and
reading it from a cookie cutter, sugar glazed book is just so dumb.
It’s not
like I don’t want to fall in love. Not that I don’t want to get married. Not
that I don’t want to have a family of my own. It’s just that I think reading
from those books, gives you very high ideals on how everything should be
perfect. When in reality, it’s really not that clear cut. Sure you have ideals
and motivations and some of them planted in you when you read so and so book or
something but in the end, life is never what the books say. I mean, even all
the things that have been written in medical texts have been researched and
really the most general and common presentation of some such situation or
disease, will almost never present the same. And that’s like, damn.
So, in
essence, I think that reading those books is dumb and I’m just gonna wing it.
In the end,
what made me contemplate love and all the convoluted reasons behind it, and
marriage, and so many things that I cannot for the life of me articulate into a
comprehensible sentence, is that today, is my parent’s wedding anniversary. And
we know how that went off to.
I told my
mother this morning, Happy-however-happy-you-want-it-to-be Anniversary. She
asked me how to be happy. I told her to have a cookie.
Have
fun contemplating life, love and the (apparently, to some books and people) lovely,
beautiful and sparkly institution that is marriage.
akunona
No comments:
Post a Comment