The Not Foreigner-inspired Edition

I'm not sure I know what love is anymore.

The idea of love is so changed. I mean, that's what it does, right? Change. It's this abstract concept, this abstract noun, this intangible. Yet, everyone claims some kind of identity for it which is totally cool by me. I've had my own definitions for it. It's been significant, invariably, through each day of my lived-life. I guess I'm just not sure what it is anymore.

I'm talking, of course, of that romantic kind of love. The oft-poeticized love. The love that is sometimes written Love, with a capital letter to start. The Jove/Eros love. The John Cusak love. I'm just not sure what it is anymore. At least for me and to me. Last night, jogging to the phone each time my houseline rang, chanting a little mantra as a wish for who I'd want it to be, I found myself feeling like it could be something like this. Like the little jog and the little chant. But, I'm not sure that I'd decided it was. Looking back on it now--a full 11 hours after the last call that wasn't who I'd hoped it would be, I think I've determined that it's not really any kind of love that I've ever known, at all. Not the jogging and the wishful sing-song kind, anyway. It is, instead, something else. Some other thing.

The more I grow old, the more I feel like I did when I was twelve and sure that no one would ever love me the way that Lloyd Dobbler loved Diane Court or the way that Ferris Buller loved Sloane Peterson. I'm not sure why that is since, at this point, I've been loved like both enough times that I can't pretend to begin even counting half of the times. Yet, it seems so foreign, so impossible. Not for now, not like it had ever happened before. In this alterna-verse of what love is and forgetting what love is, maybe I've just forgotten what it was like. Like, what it has been like to feel love. Because I'm so tired of being disappointed when the Diane Courts of the world don't give up to the hunt of the Lloyd Dobblers of the world (ie. me) or when the Ferris Bullers of the world get more and more caught up in their own egos and drop any affection for their beloved Sloane Petersons when they realize how much cooler than the Sloanes they are. So, now, at this very place and time, there's instead of any prospect of successful love, a lack of faith in all possibility, and, essentially, a lack of trust in what I can't control.

I come to this quandary a mere three days after happily claiming aloud to He Who Should Be My Beloved outside of a bookstore with coffees in our hands and smiling stupidly at one another under the shade during a blistering hot afternoon post-lunch, "I'm feeling so much happier now that I've decided to trust you."

"When did this happen?" he asked.

"After you showed up to my dinner party last Saturday."

"So, up until last Saturday night, everything I said was a lie?" he retorts.

"No, it's not so much you that I didn't trust, but things. Like, this thing that we've got." I tell him, "I'm just happier now that I'm not trying to control everything about it."

I come to this realization about not knowing what love is and, actually, not feeling so bad about it. Feeling good about it, in fact, because feeling this kind of not-knowing is kind of liberating. It opens me up to the possibility of being surprised by a new feeling, a different feeling, a whirlwind experience of something totally novel and unexpected. My hope, of course, is that it will be unprecedented, too. It will be unprecedented in a great way, not in a sucky one, and, running its course, this novelty will be glorious in that it will have done its own on its own and it will have been something worth the experiencing of.

For all of the not-trusting of him and the cyclothymic-ness of my feelings about the whole enchilada of potential between us, I think I just ended up precisely at the other end of the spectrum, the end whereat you find that you've gone so far that you're at the beginning again, at some place where you had tried to be--you had forced yourself to be--but, now, you're just organically that way. There's no other way to be at that place. You're almost like a Bizzaro-you, but without any superpower. Rather, it's like riding a wave, which being a non-surfer, I'm not accustomed to in any respect. Shore-like or otherwise.

In fact, when Jim Henson told me today that "all [I] do is be laid back," I had to quickly counter with "No. I'm the most wound-up person you know. I even have a blog about my clothes which, by extension, means that even getting dressed is complicated for me." He couldn't but agree with the statement and retracted his previous argument.

Back to the what love is now question, I'm still not sure. It's changed. It's changed so much. Love, for a long time, was That Dog songs. Mostly crushes, mostly tornado-cones of mish-mashed emotional overloads. Here's a cow. Here's Bill Paxton. Here I am without a belt to tie me to some piping and keep me from getting swept up in it. It's been a lot of hard-work and nursing, too. Years of care-taking and nursing. Years of being the one in control so that at least someone's taking care of things. So that, at least, someone's keeping the two of us from falling apart. Love has been like that and it has been that. Love has been less about the letting someone in and trusting someone else than it has been about the honeymoon and the wartime mobile army surgical hospital a mile from the frontlines without the accompanying canned laugh tracks. And, maybe now, it has finally become something else and something other. Something that I'm not too sure of and something that I may not find out about for a while. It can, for once, be something that I cannot and will not qualify with words.