Sleepwalking and Covering No Ground

I still believe in love. I do not know what it looks like or feels like, but I believe in it. She is like God, always there and never seen, until you die. Dead people know all about love. It is not as though they themselves can love, I would not think, as they are dead. To whom does one give love? To other dead people?

That was stupid. Love is ethereal, intangible, trumps reality, violates the boundaries of living and dead, disrupts organization, follows no rules, totally autonomous, kind of selfish, everlasting, immeasurably vital, and inexplicable.

To be frank, I hate the word and love the concept. The true, clean, nonexistent, unattainable concept of love I mean, not love of love songs or romance novels, or chick flicks. And not “need love” either. Like how very young children apparently love their mothers or fathers. They are not functional yet and need their parents more than they love their parents. Although I do believe that love grows.



Let us think of another word to refer to ‘love’ as because I will not be able to write this if I have to type and hear the word ‘love’ in my head over and over again. Let us call her … Derecha. Derecha is Spanish for ‘right’: right as in the direction not right as in true. Love is true, but that is arguable for some.

By true, clean, nonexistent, unattainable concept of love (Derecha) I mean just that. The Derecha we talk about all the time is diluted, no matter how intense it may feel to a body. Real Derecha is ethereal, like I said, too perfect for this world and its hang-ups, its hesitant, abusive, misused, overused, fake, partial, unexpressed, and mustered variants of emotion. Really the problem is emotional dishonesty and lack of communication. People do not tell the truth but play games, dating games, wait-three-days-to-call-him games, forget-to-tell-her-she-is-just-a-jump-off games, you-made-me-mad-so-I-don’t-love-you-right-now games. People play games that real Derecha does not even know the rules to.

True Derecha is like 0 Kelvin. Kelvin is a measurement of temperature or more concretely, a measurement of the speed of the moving atoms in some material thing. At zero Kelvin (-274.15°C or -461.47°F), there is an absolute absence of all atomic movement, hence Absolute Zero.

But the problem with Absolute Zero is that there is no way to truly measure it. The very act of measuring, sticking some apparatus into the matter, disrupts the total stillness and precipitates movement of the atoms, generating heat, however small, and therefore destroying Absolute Zero status. That is true of Derecha too. People, any person who feels her automatically ruins her absoluteness as they inject their apparatuses to measure, prove, show, flaunt, disguise, maintain, or give their Derecha.

I do not think you can ever deny Derecha. Even in the times when I am seemingly irretrievably embittered by Derecha, the songs about her move me, the people on the street I see doing lovey-dovey stuff make me jealous (which is movement in me too). Every time I meet a new guy, I wonder, is this where I fall in love again? But I never say, “Is he the one?” because I believe one can have more than one. I wonder still, is this where I stop singing sad songs? Is this my damn love song incarnate? Come on. And it disappoints me that no one can tell me or answer these questions. Now try to convince me life is not a huge disappointment.

Secondly, or thirdly, or whatever point number this is, what is this business about falling in love? Falling is a horrible, sometimes painful, always embarrassing accident of life. Why would I want to fall in love? Do you see what I am telling you here? Love is doom because I must first fall.

So I met a new guy. Of course I wondered. I am still wondering, but I am already disappointed, as is often the case. I am not disappointed with him so much as I am disappointed with myself and with Derecha. It would be great to hold the right hand of Derecha and actually know it is she.