The One Thing I Could Not Tell You About

If you are curious, I could tell you about that winter when I fell in love. The short-lived romance and the tears of joy and of the pain that shattered my young heart. Or those summers when I thought I had found something and when truths were revealed and dreams were broken. Then that spring when I was starstruck, chasing after a fantasy only to realize it was only just that. And this fall when I met a man. A man whose idea I couldn’t get enough of. There was just something about him that excited me so much, something he was well aware of, and that he had warned me about, saying how much of a bad news he was. I knew, I laughed and I remembered. I remember finding the presence of him mediocre and yet, when he was away, I forgot about it all and I started to want him back only because of who I thought he should be. Young things like that — if you want to hear, I could go on and on about.

But I bet you have already known. You have already seen through all these bold words, the strong statements, the lessons, the mistakes to reach to the bottom of my ideology. The real bit of me, all raw and naked. That one truth that I had been afraid one day someone would discover and call me out on. Now, I’m not. Not really any more. I think it has become so obvious, so ridiculously, utterly transparent that, these words, these ideas in the name of love, are all born out of a girl who has never loved. A girl who couldn’t tell you what it is like to be real and vulnerable because she doesn’t let anyone, or anything, or love get to her. She laughs at young love and the youngsters who believe in a happy ending. She’s cynical, hypocrite. So, what she has here — what I have here, is all the butterfly words of no depth and substance. And thus, I’m frustrated.

I’m frustrated because I don’t have any good answer to you. If right now you ask me to name one person, a man I really know, really understand, really care about, truly love, as humanly, as authentically as possible, I honestly cannot. There is no man like that at all. No name in my head. No memory to remember. No deep connection that I could wish to last for life. To imagine the days we grow old together, taking pleasure from the mundane that we are then left with. To be fair, it’s actually good. I’m young, I’m free and I’m tied to nothing. I’m well aware that there are people who go through this life without a partner and many have one out of compassion, not necessarily love. It’s normal to not know love. It’s even more common to only get somewhere close to love, having experienced one or many variants of it. It will come, they would say. You still have your whole life a head of you, they would remind. And I agree with it, carrying on with my life despite all else.

But like I said, I’m still frustrated because much as I demand to touch life as it is, I don’t understand the essence of it, which I believe for the most part is love — selfless, unconditional, love-someone-for-who-they-are, human-to-human kind of love. I can’t help but feel like a liar, an outsider to my own life, being on the surface of my own expressions, unable to touch the core of my own words. I ask myself when it is possible that I wouldn’t need much but could just understand what it’s like to live life to the fullest, to have no regrets, to look into someone’s eyes and without a single word, feel that connection that’s only felt by two loving, self-aware humans. And that’s the one thing I could not tell you about because to me, it’s still quite a puzzle. I need time, patience and perhaps more time to live this life at my own pace, to be okay and ready, and make the most of my being human.

But this is also the one thing I don’t want to tell you about even if I could because if you haven’t known it yet, you should, like me, figure it out yourself. That’s the whole point of it and that’s, in fact, the only way to it. You have to let it reach you, warm you, heal you and be with you in its most natural, authentic state, for that’s what this is all about. I know it’s tough and it takes time but I also know it firstly takes a lot of courage. And courage can only come from you and me, within each of us. The courage to go out there, take risk, open up and welcome people into our world, knowing we can be let down, get hurt but none of it is a big deal because we trust that what our courage leads us to will make it all okay and worthwhile. We won’t just get to know love and learn to love others but along the way, I believe a wonderful thing will happen. That is, we will find ourselves and a way to love ourselves. Truly, deeply, humanly.

And I believe that’s the one thing only you could tell you about.