What Love Made of Me

Prelude

I don't know who I am right now.

I didn't know yesterday. I didn't know last year. I'm sure as hell I won't know tomorrow. Frankly, I'm not even sure I want to. If I went back and examined everything that has happened to me—the things I did, the things I failed to do, every way I responded and every way I remained silent—I don't think I would like the person I found there.

Scratch that.

I know I wouldn't.

It didn't feel like me. It doesn't sound like me. But it was me, and I can't take any of it back. I don't want to regret my life, but people talk about regret as though naming it makes it easier to carry. I don't even know what I regret anymore: the things I did, or the person I became while doing them. Perhaps they are the same thing.

There are a few moments, though, when I think I was telling the truth.

When I sat alone in my room and let myself think. When I talked to someone—I think I loved him—about nothing and everything at once. When the silence between us didn't feel empty, only unperformed. Those moments felt real because I wasn't trying to become anyone else inside them.

There were other times when I did good things, and I suspect I was performing those, too. Maybe ninety percent of it was a lie. Maybe the remaining ten percent was some confused mixture of wanting to be good, not knowing what else to do, and not knowing what I was supposed to feel.

I am empty often enough that I've begun to distrust every emotion that reaches me. The reactions, the tenderness, the concern—sometimes they all feel rehearsed, as though I learned them from watching other people and never quite understood what they meant.

Except when I cry.

Even then, I don't always know why I'm doing it. Sometimes the tears feel staged, as though I'm performing grief for an audience that isn't there. Other times, it feels as if I've swallowed something sinister and dark, and it has lodged beneath my ribs. I can't get it out. It consumes me until I become it.

Or perhaps I was always the dark part, and I only mistook the light for something that could save me.

Once, I cried after telling my friends what I had done while they were away. I hated myself for it then. I hate myself for it still. For the things I did. The crimes I committed. The lies I cultivated and continue to tell.

I cried because, for a moment, I could see myself clearly, and I couldn't bear the sight.

Sometimes I cry for other people. I watch them endure things, stand up beneath the weight of them, demonstrate a courage I can't imagine possessing, and I wonder what I would have done in their place. Would I have survived? Would I have fought? Would I have drowned quietly and called it fate?

I cried at the last funeral I attended, though I don't know why. I don't know if I was sad, angry, frightened, annoyed, or feeling nothing at all. I don't know whether the tears belonged to me, or whether I had simply learned the shape grief was supposed to take and performed it convincingly.

I'm no longer sure what the truth is.

Was it yes, no, or maybe? Was I forced, or did I force someone else? Did I want it? Did I ask for it? Did I cry, scream, hit, fight back—did I do anything to alter the course of my own life? Or did I let everything happen because I was too afraid to stop it?

Why can't anything ever be easy?

Sometimes, to sound clever or interesting, I say that easy things aren't meaningful. That difficulty makes them worthwhile. But difficulty has never made me feel alive. It makes me want to disappear almost every second of my life. I've never felt rewarded by suffering, and I know enough about myself to believe I don't deserve a reward anyway.

I often wonder what it would feel like to be loved.

Not admired. Not tolerated. Not forgiven in installments.

Loved completely, even after someone knew everything.

I think I would be happy if someone could love me no matter what. But that kind of love would be dangerous in my hands. It would become messy. Desperate. Either I would destroy them, or they would destroy me, or we would hurt each other until there was nothing left to save.

Maybe I don't deserve that kind of love.

I hurt, and I am hurt, and I will hurt again.

Why can't something just be easy?