Contrite Illumination

Regarding the quote which masqueraded as a post yesterday:

It is not really physically difficult to tell someone you love them. What is difficult, and what becomes increasingly difficult as I get older, is saying it to someone and really meaning it.

When I was younger, I believed in love. I was so eager to feel it that I told myself I was in love with people I hardly knew, people who were as ill-formed and confused as I was, if not more (though I find that difficult to conceive of). When I finally had the opportunity to express those feelings, I threw myself into it wholeheartedly. I think, like many people, I was in love with the idea of being in love; ideas are, after all, much neater and tidier than people are. This makes ideas necessarily less interesting and rewarding, but much more convenient.

Now, I don't really know what I believe. What I thought was love I do not recognize as love today; aspects remain, but the past love I felt was fundamentally flawed. I don't believe in love at first sight; I do believe in lust at first sight. I think it's possible to meet people and instantly know they will factor into your life somehow, that meeting and knowing them will change your and their lives, just as it is sometimes possible to feel the course of your life changing, to feel, in your bones, the divergent paths that lay before you.

Part of the problem, I think, (well, it's not really a problem, but whatever) is that love is not a static thing, nor should it be. Love is not a component that you take around with you and plug into each person you fall in love with. Each love is unique, as unique as the person whom you feel it towards. And, as people are always growing and changing, so must your love for them, or you risk waking up one day and saying I love you to someone you don't know, to a ghost who they used to be but aren't any more.

In some ways, I suppose this is saddening; who among us has not wished things could stay frozen in time in one perfect moment? Yet things can never stay the same; events conspire to pull us apart and push us together, people come into contact with new ideas and individuals. Perhaps the concept of love as constant is what is most damaging about it; perhaps it people accepted the inevitability of its change they would feel freer to love and be loved as they lived their lives, rediscovering their love for each other with every new day.

I want to say I love you again to someone, someday. But I want it to mean something, something more than movie-of-the-week bullshit. That is what makes me hesitate; not because I find it difficult, but because I don't want to devalue it in any way. And yet, is it really devaluing to say it, if it is truly felt and honestly expressed? Is love supposed to be a blanket term, is it supposed to mean respect and honor and cherish and lust for and am amused by and so forth?

Man, where's Forrest Gump when I need him.

Oh, and in a completely unrelated note, I'm sort of thinking of getting this t-shirt. Bunnies!