Songs for a Neophyte: 2015.27

The Troubles
U2 (and Lykke Li)

Who left this child in me?
I feel aimless, but it's not my fault, I swear
There's a thousand years between me and adulthood
I'm an adolescent
I'm immature
In a body pounded flat by the years
Hammered to a papery-thinness
Still wishing for summer vacations and the end of school
There's nothing inside me besides
I couldn't fit more if I wanted
This baby has grown

Lyrics
Love is not accidentally finding out that "somebody stepped inside your soul (oh no)." Love is not realizing "somebody else was in control." At least, it shouldn't be. Bono and crew have written an ambush, a surprise. I don't think it's good to treat your love this way, to wake up to it suddenly. I worry that so many people have no idea how to walk into a relationship with their eyes open.

I worry that maybe I have no idea how to walk into a relationship (with my eyes open.)

But when I do open my eyes, I see such simple things. Do other people not see like I do? Am I the only one who blinks the sleepy crust from my lids every morning, or am I fooling myself into thinking other people are more foolish than they really are? Let me lay it out for you so that you can understand what you already know. Folks make these unbelievable generalizations about what men want and what women want, and it's all doublespeak to avoid the scary bits, the truthful bits, the things I think everyone knows and nobody wants to say. The recipe for falling in love with someone is simple.
Trust them.

I know you shouldn't, you know you shouldn't. We're all adults here, we know how broken hearts get made. It's the same cussed recipe. Pick things to trust this person with, even though perhaps it's a little cockamamie. Tell them your secrets. Explain to them transparently what you're doing and why. Say the exact words "I'm going to tell you something honest and scary. Honest because I want to tell you the truth, and have you tell me the truth. Scary because I will have to trust you when there's no possible proof that I should." And then, if you're so unbelievably lucky that they pay you back in kind, with fear and trust, you will find yourself under a magic spell so powerful that your biology will never be able to break it: a legitimate relationship, built purposefully and with full acknowledgement by both parties.

I remember an ancient relationship, the first I really felt deep down, and we played Truth or Dare. The game was 95% Truth: a constant heady rush of telling the other person things we didn't think we'd ever have to dig out for anyone, and yet here was a person who trusted me enough to tell me about an unforgivably embarrassing first kiss, and I would be a heartless cad to not tell about the time I mortified myself in front of God and everybody and the whole school by shouting the most juvenile joke imaginable, and why shouldn't the stories continue, and suddenly the whole night was taken up with small increments of trust and the sun came up and the world shone bare light on the small sprout of a new relationship. And the Dares were sweeter than pure maple syrup because I always knew the boundary of trust was beyond anything I could push with a Dare. I knew (or thought I knew) the secret places of a person's heart, so nothing could scare me about my body anymore.

It's the same with anything. Humans are terrible and lovely, and if we fake a thing for long enough, well. It's the same as doing it. If you want a relationship, really truly? Act as if you have it. You know it's true. It's just maybe you've not yet put words to it.

Stephen
I know you picked this years ago and you're in a very different place. But I feel like what you wrote is identically true today.

"There comes a point when you realize what happened. Now matter how much you may love, be in love with, or even afraid of the person…you have to let go. You can’t keep denying yourself. You can’t keep blaming yourself for what they’re doing to you. They may not even understand or know what they’re doing. It doesn’t matter. You have to move on.

That’s what I’m trying to do."

I guess I should write about this, too, about the awful whiplash of having someone walk away when you trusted them so much, when you both knew neither of you could ever under a million crystalline suns in a million perfect days ever earn the keys to a person's heart. I guess I should write about the crash and the pain, but I have felt it. You know I have felt it, if you know me (cold rejection, burning anger, violent apathy all), and honestly?

I have such abject sympathy for the old idiocy:
Better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all.
-Tennyson