"I was scared not to have somebody putting his arms around me, so I could never say no. That's all. Nothing good can come from that. All it does is grind down the meaning of life a piece at a time. The real meaning can only be found in love" Haruli Murakami from his book After Dark
I'm not sure what my boyfriend found the most bizzare
actually - the tombstones or the living. Yeah... a strange statement to
begin a blog with but stick with me... this'll all make sense in a
while.
Considering that most of us plan our lives secretly hoping we live till 100, you would think that our plans would mostly be centered around contributing something massive to the world.
I mean 100 years is a very long time.
Even
if you minus off the tedious first 20 years of learning how to be
human, and the next ten of learning how not to piss other humans off...
that gives us 70 years of being rather excellent at being human and
contributing loads to this little blue planet third from the star we
call the sun.
So what do we obsess about?
Well
yeah a handful of us do get around to building spacecrafts or curing
disease... but most of us (including the spacecraft builders and the
disease curers) obsess about finding just one fellow human who gets us.
What we really want is like minded and simpatico company on the bloody long and often tedious journey that is life.
We
are not looking for friends (most of us have them, and most of us
celebrate the differences between us and our friends) - we are looking
for that one person who without being blood related or having any other
compelling reason to do so, would gladly take a bullet for us. Someone
for whom your very existence gives meaning to theirs. Someone who from
their own free will simply loves us.
It
seems a rather odd thing to focus so much of our lives on, but this is
the stuff that inspires our art, our cultures, our religions, our lives.
This is the stuff that fills our bookshelves, our gallery wals ,our
theatres, our cinemas. The pursuit, the gaining, the holding on to, the
loss, the mourning... of love.
On Valentines Day, I took my boyfriend for a walk in a cemetery. (Yep
I am the last of the great romantics huh???!) But before you mock... check out tombstones for a
summary of what peoples lives mean.
There were no tombstone with outpourings of what a great employee someone was.
There were no tombstones about how fabulous someones score at sport was.
There were no tombstones with how on time someone always was at events.
They all said the same thing... the departed would be greatly missed by the people who loved them.
Because in summary THAT is all a life is.
A connection, an outpouring, a receptacle for love.
And to be honest... it's all we leave behind.
Unless
of course you are one of those fancy smanshey bods who manage to do that AND
build a space craft or two or cure a lurgy as well. But face facts …
that ain't many of us.
For
most of us, the biggest thing that will happen to us in our hopefully
long lives, is finding THE ONE..(who will ensure we have a great
tombstone saying how loved we were).. but mainly who will keep us
company till we get to that point.
I
may be lucky (one half of family at least have more than their fair
share of centenarians) so I might just make it to 100. I have chosen my
friends well, they are great people - each and every one of them, and
they are mostly pretty healthy so there's no shortage of pall bearers when my
time comes! But it had always bothered me that there was no one to order
the stone and have carved on that my life, my existence, gave THEIR life
meaning.
Then
along came a series of random events and misdirections that led to The Boyfriend. And with rather inappropriate speed I thought...'oh goody
this is The One'. A thought he rather scarily echoed out loud. [peuk... yes, yes,I know how THAT reads!]
But how do we know it's love?
I've
always done a rather good obsession myself. I've had quite a few. [for few read a lot] Fun
as it was at the time, it could be viewed that I have wasted many a year on totally unsuitable men. When the inevitable parting of the ways comes, my personal greek-chorus
(the family I chose...AKA my friends) love to point out to me how that one
was a wrong-un from the get go. They are very good like that! Therefore
in recent years I've been very good at ensuring my obsessions and my
friends never really meet. Cause even I knew they were wrong-un's on
some deep level...which is probably about the only deep feelings that
ever went on.
However, the JaxWorld way of knowing it's love is to suddenly feel, even against that backdrop, that it is perfectly sensible to drag a man around the never ending circle of people that occupy key positions in my life. And by way of underlining the point - for the object of my affection to agree it's perfectly sensible too. The
proof being the fact he hasn't run away screaming shows that either my friends are
behaving well when I am out of the room, or it must be love at his end. {Note: my friends NEVER behave well when I am out of the room}
So far the poor man has had the double whammy of not one but two gay best friends. I hasten to add for the sake of clarification that mine are not a couple so he had to do this twice.
I am pretty sure my boyfriends homosexual circle is a tad smaller than
mine, [Read as pretty non existent] but love me love my guys. He seemed
to survive unscathed and is happily facebook friending My Guys, so SCORE!
He also had to survive the long long long established friends - these are the ones who have put in the years and although our paths have diverged still mean everything to me. So away to the country to see the
married friends it was. This was more difficult for me to police as
unlike My Guys these were not sojourns to hostelries where its easy not to leave the boyfriend alone for embarrassing questions... eventually on this trip I was eventually gonna have to pee! Okay ...apart from the fact that I came back from
the loo to discover the album of my friends hen night on the coffee
table (WHY SHOW NEW BOYFRIEND THAT >>>>WHY???) all seemed
well. Weeks later everyone is still in contact and chatting so great!
He
has also survived the meeting with the ex who won't quite go away. I'm not sure where I stand on two
men who know what I look like naked shaking hands... but hey ho. It
certainly helped The Boyfriend is a more physically impressive male, so
it was entertaining for him to exert this advantage during their brief
meeting.
Then there are the social friends... to be fair this is more my boyfriend's area of expertise... he just slotted in like he's always been there. But he cannot quite understand why it is I have so many different circles. Ha... he's only done a couple! LOL
Of
course there are the family members... who he has again managed to
seamlessly slot around and with. (Only 100 more to go mate...don't fret!)
It's
taken us our whole lives to this point to find each other, you think we
would just settle down and enjoy that... but no... the drive to
validate what we have in the eyes of our nucleus of key people is real driving force. I do appreciate that my nucleus is a bit more complicated than most - but he goes along with it, happy to become a permanent fixture in JaxWorld, as I his. (Though face facts I get the easy bit!).
I
guess it may be that I never did design that space craft. Or I guess
it simply may be that I haven't quite cured any known disease. Maybe
that's why it is so important to me to show my world that even though for years the 6,970,442,289
people on this planet couldn't produce just one that was compatible
with me... I found him! And he seems to like being found.
Because at the end of my life, no one is ever gonna remember anything much about it...
Except the love actually.
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