Nasty Conjugation

Hello people. Our time in Japan has grown quite short. We’ll be leaving in nearly a week, returning to America’s diamond-encrusted shores with stories of our adventures and thousands of pictures which I promise I will force you to look at. Speaking of pictures, there are some new ones of our trip to Hakone on the Flickr account. I have to admit that I am getting pretty emotional about leaving here, but for the moment I will spare you from reading anything about that.

No!

Instead I will make you read about how much I love Ms. Holly Parker! Ha ha! So if you’re sick of how touchy-feely I get, don’t even bother clicking below. It’s almost Valentine’s Day, after all, so it’s that one time of year where I don’t have to be ashamaed about being a hopeless romantic.

I don’t believe in true love. I don’t understand how true love is supposed to be romantic. What does that mean, “true love?” Supposedly there is one person out there who represents my perfect match, my one true love, my ideal, and it’s my duty as a star-crossed lover to go forth and find her.

How unfair is that?

How unfair if she lives in Sri Lanka and I in Columbus, Ohio. Or does fate operate conveniently within geographical and ethnic boundaries? How unfair to every woman I go through in the process of finding her! Are we meant to just shake hands at the end of every non-Fated relationship, secure in the understanding that Destiny had other plans? Does Destiny have an address where he can be reached?

Do homosexuals get some true love? I’ve been lead to believe that gay lovers are unnatural, so I wonder if nature ever took the time to arrange their perfect romance.

But okay, let’s suppose we, against all odds, manage to find this true love of ours. After all, if Fate is Fate then we have no choice in the matter, right? It inevitably happens, fireworks explode in our hearts, eyes, brains, elbows, wherever, and we know this is it. This is the one! It was pre-ordained!

Wait. I just realized something. What could be less romantic than something so involuntary as Destiny? Here’s a list of some other pre-ordained, inescapable, involuntary things:

Perspiration. Bowel movements. Fermentation. Tectonic motion. Time. Space. Gravity. Decay. Old age. Disease. Taxes. Lists. Debates over religion. Tripping over that coat hanger in the middle of the night that you dropped earlier when you were doing laundry. Love?

So perhaps the idea of being swept up in love, of losing all control to the power of cosmic romance, is appealing. It means that our connection is sanctioned, powered by some universal force that makes it okay for us to give ourselves fully to the one we love. Sure, it sounds nice, but to me it just sounds like biology. Science. Something we use in place of responsibility.

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“She wasn’t the one.”

No.

I want to look the woman I love in the eye and tell her, in no uncertain terms, that I love her because I choose to – not because I was destined to, but because I want to. I need to, not because the cosmos has chosen it, but because the thought of choosing any different sort of life is unbearable to me.

I am not forced to love you.

No one, nothing, held my hand and led me to you.

If it was coincidence, or Fate, or God that brought us together then they have my thanks, my unending gratitude, but understand that it was my choice to stay. It is my choice to greet every morning with you beside me. I sought you out, and I seek you still. I won’t let true love cheat me out of the significance of what we have. Our love never sprung fully formed from a lucky intersection of the stars. We planted it, and we carry it, and we will nurture it and see how it grows.

With so many things in this life that are inevitable and out of my control, at least let me have this one thing: that my love is mine, mine to choose, mine to give. It should be immeasurably stronger than something doled out by Fate, a birthright, easy and assumed. I want the struggle for love to be significant, a real struggle, because a prize that is fought for and won is so much more valuable than something that was guaranteed from the start. I want my constant effort to be rewarded by something amazing and unique. I deserve nothing more than what my diligence merits.

At the end of the day I want to hold your hand even tighter with the knowledge that I didn’t earn you lightly.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 at 9:48 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.