be my veins

"Love is nothing, nothing, nothing like people say
you gotta pick up the little pieces every day…"
-Liz Phair, Love is Nothing

"For a heart beats the best in a bed beside the one that it loves…"
-Lady Lamb the Beekeeper, Crane Your Neck

For a while, it felt like everyone else was falling in love and I was just falling apart.  It was like some kind of pheromone phenomenon.  Everyone around me was talking and dating, mating and relating, getting engaged and pregnant and coming together.  Normally, I couldn’t care less about people and their paramours but when so many people were coming together in such a small amount of time, it threw me for a loop.

And I kind of felt down about it.

I never wanted to be the kind of person who was happy simply because I was in love.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  you don’t need another person to be happy.  I really believe(d) that.  I know my writing and whining about being lonely doesn’t always (or ever) reflect that philosophy but even loners get lonely…right?

But what if I’m wrong?  What do I know about love?  I’ve always thought I had the level head, that my heart wasn’t tainted by crushes or heavy feelings and I could dole out decent advice about the topic because I was removed from it.  I could think logically.  But maybe you can only know so much about love from mere observation.  Maybe the best way to know about love is to live it, to love and be loved.

But how do you start to love?  How do you know if you’re doing it right?  How does any one of us know?  The heart doesn’t come with a handbook.  Love is universal yet it seems the way in which we all come across it and experience it is unique.

And what if happiness, or at least some form of it, does come from love?  If you don’t love, are you missing out on happiness?

We are inundated with stories and music and movies based around the concepts of love and happiness being intertwined.  It can really screw with your perceptions.  And I think, no matter a person’s stance on love and happiness, we are all a little bit brainwashed into thinking love is how you obtain happiness.

I don’t know what love means to me.  I’ve never been in a relationship and haven’t had strong feelings for many people.  In fact, the only feelings I’ve had have only been in the past couple of years. And I have to wonder if there’s been a part of me that’s forced myself to feel these things so I can feel like I’m normal, that my heart does in fact work. I’m still not entirely convinced.

And to give myself some credit and because I don’t want to make myself sound like the most horrendous troll ever birthed, I will say through the years, girls have been interested in me.  I’m not so disgusting that no one wants me.  But with these girls…I just didn’t want them.  I’ll admit there’s been interest over the years but it’s never been mutual.  It’s either been on my part or on their part.

And in some ways, their interest in me was almost as bad as no one wanting me because I still ended up alone.  I could take comfort in the fact that I didn’t have to be but I never wanted to lower my standards and date girls I wasn’t interested in.  But Brannon, you couldn’t have known unless you tried it!  Maybe you’re right but I didn’t and I can’t change that now.

But being liked and not liking someone or liking someone and not being liked has been a source of frustration for me. Maybe I should have tried harder to make things work but was it too much to expect to want a mutual infatuation? Maybe that’s not the way it always works and maybe it was never mean to work for me like that.

Even the movies and television shows and books have depicted characters not feeling each other only to be madly in love by the third act. Maybe I just haven’t gotten that far. So why is it I can see the credits coming?

I am alone. I am lonely. I want a friend. I want a girlfriend. I don’t believe in marriage, but damn it, I want a wife. I want to be with someone. I want to sleep with someone and learn about two bodies together. I want to love. I want to be loved. I want to know what all the fuss is about. I want to know what all the books and movies and television shows meant when they showed two people falling in love.

I’ve often thought I was meant to be alone. Some people just don’t mesh. I always thought I was defective. But I’m not sure if that’s right anymore. How misguided we are to think out of the billions of people on Earth, we won’t find someone compatible.  I’m not 100% sure there’s someone out there for everyone but I do think there’s someone out there for most people.  The problem lies in the actually finding that person.  It’s not that they aren’t out there, it’s that we might never encounter them.  What if my soulmate lives in Bulgaria, y’all?

Kude si bila prez tseliya mi zhivot? O, da, v Bulgariya.

I also don’t like the idea of relying on the other person to be happy.  Sure, love can bring happiness.  I’ll concede to that.  But I don’t think that should be the be all and end all to happiness.  It always makes me sad when a couple are parted for any number of reasons and one person crumbles.  Do we really attach so much of ourselves to our partners that when the partner has passed, we can no longer function as a single individual?  Are we somehow lessening ourselves by doing that?  Are we saying we are not enough of a person to press on?  Are we that weak?We need to realize that people will not complete us like a puzzle.  We are already whole and complete.  We are not made to interlock but to overlap.

There’s a part of me that knows I’m not a monster. I can be loveable but the fact that I have not been loved all these years makes me question it. And I don’t mean love as in someone enjoying my company but love as in someone wanting to be with me in an exclusive romantic relationship. Sure, there’s been crushes but no one’s been crazy about me.

I want someone to be my veins, you know?  I don’t want someone to be my blood, to be the source of my life.  I just want someone to be the conduit to help the blood flow.  I want someone to help me help myself.  I want someone to love me and show me it’s okay for me to love me.  And in that love, I want to be made whole, but not by the other person filling the void.  I want them to show me I can assemble my own parts.

I think it’s kind of romantic to think of someone else completing us but I also think it sets us up for small deaths.  When we pour so much of ourselves into someone else, we neglect who we are.  I don’t want someone to be my strength.  I don’t want someone to be my confidence.  Because people are fleeting.  People come and people go and even the best relationships end, whether it be by choice or death.  And when that person, that strength, that confidence is gone, we are only left with ourselves, the ones we put on hold to harbor someone else.

I want someone to help me improve myself instead of just being that improvement for me.  I don’t want a better half.  I want a better whole to help me become a better whole.  Maybe love is helping someone else become better and independent and self-sufficient.  Love is giving a skill instead of taking a feeling, teaching someone how to tap into their inventory of talents so they can apply them to other pursuits once you are gone.  Maybe love is empowerment.

And when that person goes away, I don’t want to be devastated.  I don’t want to come apart again.  I want to hurt without hemorrhaging.  I want to cry and carry on because you can’t get strength from a corpse or a divorce.

But what do I know?  Maybe I’m romanticizing it as much as those who say we are incomplete without a partner.  I guess I’d just like to think I’m at least taking steps toward a more logical approach to love.  I’ll admit I don’t know much but I think real love is more about complementing someone instead of completing them.  Or maybe I’m totally off and need someone to step in and help me flounder and figure out what love means to me.  After all, love is one feeling with a million different meanings.