Someone gives too much or someone doesn’t give enough. Someone started off with a lot to give and then someone lost their way and stopped trying. Someone cared and then someone stopped caring. Someone cares about the wrong person or someone doesn’t care about the right person. Someone is open and then someone is closed. Someone is ready and then someone isn’t ready. Someone believed and then someone stopped believing. Someone started off one way and then ended up another way. Someone starts off with hope and then someone loses hope. Someone didn’t fight hard enough to hold on. Someone meets someone that could change their life but someone passes up on the chance to be changed. Someone could say more—everything—but someone says less—nothing. Someone wants love but someone doesn’t recognize love when love shows up. Someone calls love an impossible probability instead of recognizing love when it’s in action. When it is happening to them. Someone chooses place over person. Someone moves away instead of to. Someone chooses isolation over closeness. Alienation over communion. Someone says they want when they don’t want and don’t want when they do want. Someone can’t tell what’s what or who’s who. Someone waits too long or not long enough. Someone says what they don’t mean or doesn’t say what they do mean. Someone stays and then someone goes. Someone doesn’t try hard enough. Someone doesn’t answer a call. Someone forgets. Someone forgets who they are. Who they were. Who someone else is. Someone turns their back. Someone runs away. Someone does the bare minimum. Someone gives up. Someone disappears. The world is this divide.
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What are we (all of us) looking for? What are we fighting for? Are we even paying attention? In her wonderful new post(which needs to be read in its entirety), Masha Tupitsyn quotes Etel Adnan as saying:
After a long life, I realized [love is] what matters most. When we are young, we take things for granted, which is good—we keep going in a blind way in life. We don’t realize that our first real loves were the most important things we had. Maybe we were too young to manage them. This happened to me. The first person I loved madly, I couldn’t even look at! I was blinded; I couldn’t manage the situation. When I couldn’t manage, I would stand up and leave, and the others thought I didn’t love them, you see? I messed up because of shyness, but it was really mismanagement. Things have to be managed, even emotions, which are the least manageable. Manageable means to deal with things, and I couldn’t and I regretted it all my life. I miss that person even this hour. You don’t overcome that.
I have, at times, mismanaged things. Certainly I spectacularly mismanaged things with the first person I loved madly, a person I still miss. And now I ask myself:
“In all the places [I was] hiding love, What was it [I was] thinking of?”