A long time.

The last time I posted was for a very different set of reasons to why I post now. I write this late at night, not because I cannot sleep, or am being tormented by well-meaning but linguistically ill-equipped Christians, but because I am trying to make sense of things, understand the world a little more. My parents always say that thinking is always a ‘dangerous’ thing for me – and to a certain extent they’re right. For the last few months, I’ve been thinking less (we’re talking on an emotional/philosophical plain – my degree obviously requires a great deal of thought!) and going more on instinct and you know what? It’s actually worked out for the better. I am happier being less in control, I am less worried about the past or the future (for who can change them anyway?) and am living not ‘in the present’, for who lives their life in a cliche?, but with the new knowledge that being ‘happy’ is not stopping to think if you’re happy. Not giving it a single thought, because not only have you found the person to make you feel like the small part of the world you share with one another is utterly perfect, completely your own, but also that finding ‘inner peace’ as self-help books and over-paid psychiatrists would have us believe doesn’t come from ‘understanding yourself’, but more from relaxing into the knowledge that you will never fully understand the complexities of life. If this is all sounding like pretentious contrite bollocks, then it probably is (testament to my tried and tested talent of speaking but saying absolutely nothing) – put simply, life is full of darkness and the brightest minds delight in nothing more than dwelling in this darkness, lighting it only every now and then if at all with their brightness. Reading Virgina Woolf, who might quite possibly be the best writer about ‘nothing in particular’ I have ever encountered, I see a genius – a woman who sees so many levels, layers, colours in the world, but is not content to see something is just ‘beautiful’. Love is not the flower I see it to be  – the bud opening to the light, perhaps only briefly flowering if not for longer…to Virginia this flower is grown in a dark, damp soil, trod down under the feet of generations of unrecognised men. My own juvenile example, but you see my point – intellect can be of use, but I can see now why most geniuses and poets are unhappy or unlucky in love.

Love is a concept. Just like religion, it is intangible. Everyone knows it, knows its limitations, its boundaries. Society dictates to us what it is, when to recognise it, like we’re playing i-spy or pictionary. Love is elusive, perhaps, if it exists at all. How can we draw a line from person to person and not call it love? Love is a connection between similar-minded people, but it is also a string that can carry the weight of different minds, like weights on a line. Look how I struggle to pin it down, resorting to similes like an overzealous child who still thinks poetry has to, ought to rhyme. I don’t know what love is – I am like everyone else. I am not sure I even know what ‘happiness’ is. Perhaps I am young - I still fear independence, I currently teeter on the brink of adulthood, keenly but with uncertainty, but long for the comfort of home. I am young to have known love, grief, I am young to think my words mean something, add something to the world. Love adds light to the world, but it is not the same light I see in the sky – it is a warmth that starts in a glance, a smile, a day together. It is the knowledge that for that moment, little or as long as it may be, you are transported somewhere wholly new, behind those eyes there’s no story, for stories don’t exist in a single moment; that look, that glance, that stare is not a scientific, practical measure – it’s an emotion, molten.

There is something quite beautiful about the world, but we seem to delight in focusing on the ugly, the dissatisfaction. You can’t live in bubbles, just like bubbles don’t last, popping aimlessly in the summer sky. ‘Love’, though it be beautiful, is as transient as any other emotion. Tied down it flounders; left to roam, it only prospers. I may be young. I may not be in love. Whatever I am, I know it is also what I am not. But for the time being, he makes me feel like I could just press the delete key on this whole post and not even care, for these are just words and I am real, he is real, and this whole world is worth more than these words can ever capture. Perhaps.