I had focused on ‘‘real life’’ too much. I had been a good daughter, tried to be a good friend, by the definition of people who get offended by not getting a text back in less than 24 hours. I even felt like I was beginning to excel as a cooking teacher.
Oh my God, real life can get so boring.
By doing things right for the world I was wrongdoing myself. There’s a difference between living in service for others and living to please them. Plot twist: you can please yourself and be of service to others simultaneously.
Defining yourself through the definitions and perception of others is a torture nobody should voluntarily experience. And made aware, we should all dissolve at will. Isn’t that the core of creative living? to create the terms by which we live and the guidelines, not the rules, that lead us?.
I was thinking of love and all the ways it is immensely boring when it does not feel like love. Isn’t it boring to submit yourself and stay in a place where you are not getting what you’re supposed to be getting? respect and connection to say the least. It’s like paying for a trip to the beach and arriving to a pond. You wouldn’t stay there.
Paying, because that is what we do in relationships. We pay with our time, we pay with our attention, our curiosity, our patience, vulnerability, hope and if softened the slightest bit, with our love. There is no greater payment that is done so often without a good service in return.
But why? what is lacking for someone to go get it in a place where they don’t even get what they need fully? How is that space supposed to be filled when we have no partners? is there even a space? have we ignored the importance of community?
Isn’t there a more palpable void when it’s barely filled instead of fully felt?
But even when everything is fine and we have managed a fulfilling personal and professional life, WHO IS SUPPOSED TO CUDDLE US?
What metaphoric hands exist to hold our bodies and kiss our foreheads, play with our hair and lay us on their chests?
I do not know. And I ache for five minutes when I need them. I ache for fifteen minutes when I get them from the wrong source. I find it more honorable to ache for reality than make yourself suffer with fantasy.
It is all about sitting with the emotion, not of lack but of desire. A recognition of a need for softness, a cozy environment, a pan to melt on. Arms to land on.
I ache at times. But I have never ached harder than when I’ve been with whom I am supposed to breathe deeply and be fully. And yet, I still ache.
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