fuck settling
Lately I keep thinking of this precise moment, this line, this image from Say Anything…

…in which Lloyd, bloodied. guarded, but still in the fight, says to Diane, “Are you here because you need someone, or because you need me?”
(I took the image directly from Masha’s great post No Way Out.)
For Lloyd, Diane is anything but interchangeable. She is irreplaceable. He lives in a culture in which men–the guys at the Gas-N-Sip–view treating women as interchangeable as a virtue. “All you gotta do is find a girl that looks just like her, nail her, and then dump her, man!” Lloyd’s treatment of Diane as unique is what sets him apart from the other men. So it makes sense that Lloyd does not want to be interchangeable to Diane, but unique. “Are you here because you need someone, or because you need me?”
(Someone’s someone, not anyone’s anyone.)
And I sometimes feel like our culture encourages everyone to view other people as largely interchangeable, to not get too attached and to let go and move on quickly. But I can’t.
I remember once talking about the Death Cab for Cutie song “The Sound of Settling,” and someone said to me, “Fuck settling.” I thought it was good advice. Now, I think it’s good advice for some and not such good advice for me, a 39-year-old trans woman who has been alone for far too long already. Sometimes I wake up with my body literally aching for someone’s touch. Love belongs to every one of us but it’s a lot more available to some of us than to others.
Settling would probably be the way to go. But I just can’t.
Once upon a time, a woman who knew I was in love with her asked me, “If we ever did get together, who do you think would break whose heart?”
Our youth is fleeting
Old age is just around the bend
I can’t wait to go gray
I’ll sit and wonder
Of every love that could have been
If I’d only thought of something charming to say
How do you answer a question like that? What’s the right answer? Is there some response I could have given that would have changed the way things were? “If I’d only thought of something charming to say”?
No. I don’t think there is anything I could have said.

But like Lloyd, I’m bruised and guarded but still in the fight, not for a specific person but for the idea of a person who might come along someday who is not interchangeable to me and to whom I am not interchangeable.
“I’ve got a hunger twisting my stomach into knots.”
It may not be good advice for me but I don’t have a choice. I can’t be with a person just to be with a person. This very well might lead to me, old and gray, sitting around and wondering.
But even if it means I spend my life alone,
Fuck settling.
Notes
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mashatupitsyn said: The problem was in her question itself! The point is NOT to break each other’s hearts. But to avoid breaking someone at all costs. The point is to heal each other, together.
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