Tain't no big thing
27 May 2011 05:30 AM Categories: Writing prompts
What is so appealing about going back to the beginning, before the assumptions build up and our patterns form, patterns of avoidance, of self-protection? One could argue he was part of the forming of that system, and he certainly didn’t treat me properly for the first two years, yet I look back on him with sweetness. Maybe it was because, at the end, he really loved me, and we were young enough to be optimistic, to think that life was only going to get better and better.
As I mess with my brain chemistry, with the way my neurons fire, I’ve been thinking again about love, the way it works, its chemical properties. My nonromantic self sees it as a combination of how the love object fits one’s past (in ways we may not detect) combined with a surge of neurotransmitters. Right now it’s hard for me to think of love as anything but a series of neural equations that extend until the chemicals start to peter out and it becomes a different kind of love. Familial. Or it disappears altogether.
In my dream, I told D that I loved him. He was noncommittal. We shared someone else’s bed in a strange house in the Netherlands. The room was in a basement, anonymous white walls, anonymous sheets, no windows. When the real occupant came back with his girlfriend, we had to leave. I struggled with my stuff, the bag of spilled earrings, the clothes on the floor, while D just up and left.
Love. Past + chemicals = delusion. Is this the optimistic future I had hoped for? Is this outlook just a case of another set of faulty neurons, of a brain bathed in sadness, stuck in a pattern of blah and don’t get used to it and how could we really know anyone anyway? I return to D because of the simplicity, his, ours, for the memories of wind-whipped hair in a too-fast car. I return because of the excitement, the fights, the stupid ones about the color of a boat or the cleanliness of the bathtub, the deeper ones that always ended in something closer, closer, not further away.
I don’t want to become more cynical as I get older and yet that’s what is happening. Maybe I’m on the precipice of a choice: a return to optimism and connection or the perpetual wading through the shallows of fear-based avoidance.
I’m scared. That’s it. It’s plain and simple and deep and all I want to do is look at its depths from a distance, but here I am approaching, one foot in front of the other, ready to run, run. My calves twitch. My heart betrays me. The fear is glassy and it reflects my expression and here I am, a foot extended ….
From the prompt "The first time we met."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by drusilla Lainee.
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