dear karen
There’s no rush in knowing what love really is. I’m nineteen and even I have no idea what it truly means. By a random stroke of stupidity you looked up ‘love’ in the dictionary and found it to sometimes mean romance, then you flipped the pages further to find that ‘romance’ is associated with love. Apart from having to shop for a brand new dictionary you might want to consider purchasing a new brain. The circuits up there, the ones that sometimes overlay your perception of reality with budding flowers and confetti — it may well be just a matter of serotonin and a bundle of neurotic neurons; a temporary chemical imbalance in your head.
Some don’t even have the vaguest idea of what they’re actually searching for until it’s too late, when they’ve already wasted their lives building a fortune of paper and copper that will never be able to buy them what they want. Sometimes goals can be scary because there lies the possibility of not having a right answer, and that is why majority of the elders in my family so adamantly hold on to their doctrines. It’s a safety net because you assume that no one can possibly figure it out and there’s no obligation to take risks on your part; no shame if you fail; no specific significance to the open-ended question, expunged and rendered so inconsequential that it’s so much easier to wave it off.
It’s very easy to forget that, conversely, there can never be a wrong answer and that’s what makes it so overwhelmingly beautiful — the never-ending possibilities and the eternal gambling. He could be everything to you, and you could just be a random passerby who may ultimately be a beautiful mistake in his life.
Making a mistake is the best part, because then you know for sure that you’re a wee bit closer to the answer by virtue of elimination. That is why I think fairytales are tragedies made right at the end — with the absence of contrast it’d be impossible to see how living happily ever after could be a relief. What if, by a sadistic twist of fate, living happily ever after entailed an obstinate delirium for all of posterity? Would you consider being insane albeit happy for eternity, regularly beaten up but possessing an inability to feel sorrow? What if one day you couldn’t tell if you were truly happy anymore because of the numb monotone of joy?
I find it extremely hilarious when people rhapsodise about the intangible ideas of happiness and love because of the futility. It’s like painstakingly molding an imaginary slab of clay with imaginary hands to obtain imaginary sculptures.
Your romantic delusions are analogous to optical illusions, caused by the accidental perspective — one majorly attributed to youth in your case. Still remember the first time you tasted cotton candy and in a split second you were automatically convinced that all had been right with the world? That same year the Asian Financial Crisis was a real pain in the arse and parachuting sans the parachute became a popular trend amongst bankrupt businessmen. But everyone is essentially sightless in some way and that’s why figuring life out is such a blast, the fact that the world is overflowing with half-blind jigsaw puzzle pieces searching for a picture they’ll never see in its entirety, relentlessly hoping that someday they might.
Love,
Your Skeptic Self
