[4] Of loving in the transient world

[inked on 08 january 2023]

Why is love fleeting? Why are humans afraid of love? It is the most beautiful thing one could feel most alive for. As Charlie Brown perfectly captures it:

Have you ever had that feeling when you can't stop smiling?

Your heart pounds inside your chest? You try to stand, but your knees become weak?

And then that Little Red-Haired Girl glances at you

And all of life's possibilities become so clear...

Two things here: (1) I never thought my standard of love would come from a 50s comic strip film-adaptation, and (2) love reminds us of parts of our body that always function, yet we treat in passing. Then, suddenly, as if a lightbulb lighting up, we feel everything all at once. Love makes us feel alive, is all I’m saying. How I wish humans would come to realize the loveliness of it all.

I am not a Mother Theresa descendant, but the desire for adrenaline rush in all transient materialistic tendencies—hookups, ONS, or bungee jumping (yes, they so obviously belong in the same category)—seem to have taken over. Charlie Brown’s portrait of love is far from necessity; with how people date nowadays, the bare minimum is seen as a countersign to commitment. It has become easy to cut strings from people we have had intimate relationships with for we deem mutual respect as a ticket to catching feelings. Heck, I hate even using that word, “intimate.” There is nothing intimate in undressing at a low-lit space to whisper sweet nothings to each other. There is nothing intimate with holding hands and rubbing your thumb in circles or locking each other’s eyes after a forehead kiss then mirroring smiles after. I despise how physical touch has lost its warmth for me. I never craved it, nor has it ever been a language I spoke, but now, the spark has really burned. Mere physicality has become equivalent to a lie.

This is not to say that every encounter must bear an ounce of love. I mean, with the bare minimum already out of reach, to expect is to bet at the losing team. Simply, I question how and when it became absurd for non-committal one-time-things to involve emotions, because why must we see others as less human after we get what we crave for? It is a degrading experience even for the most self-confident to be smothered with devotion and be abandoned by sunrise. It was not supposed to feel that way; it was supposed to be an embrace of one’s identity, to empower. Yet what it casts instead is a shadow of self-doubt and feeling objectified. People say you must not get attached with your one-time-things—and reasonably so—but when has asking for a little bit of care from a stranger too much of an affection?

The rush…we love to go after it. But after the doors have been closed and orgasms been licked, you are left like a cactus in the desert. Good thing is that the desert is the cactus’ natural habitat. So, eventually, you become comfortable with the sandstorm. You become content when it rains once a year. Each day is another day to embrace being alone. Because you do sustain yourself enough. Not until another traveler gazes at you, undresses your being, then goes on with its day as if it has not stepped into your space.

When have humans become so heartless?

Before anyone misses the point, I am not begging to be loved by someone I deemed temporary. You may all keep your good morning texts and heart-shaped tags if those bare minimum are too much a demand, I can very much write my own poetry with myself as the muse (and be good at it). But to gift one with ambiguity out of their unwillingness to acknowledge their void is the most miserable refuge one can live in.

I thought (but I really should have not)… One thing I will never do is to stop loving. And I do not care how many times I need to swallow my pride to say I am heartbroken—if it is the only way to prove I still feel, then let me get hurt. There is already so much uncertainty around us, so much pain and terror we live with each day that I do not wish to make something so precious lose its meaning.

Love is the most beautiful thing one could feel most alive for.

I trust that even when world ends in a dystopia, when the sun turns everything to dust, or fireballs shoot from the atmosphere, love will be the one thing I can grasp on to check if my pulse is beating. To be human is to feel, after all.