How badly are you allowed to yearn?
Feelings I know you've had + things that have inspired me lately
When people say they’re lonely, they’re not complaining about being alone. What they really mean is they want to be wanted. (Background music for reading.)
Ultimately, the goal of anyone who fantasizes about love is to build a world where words—labels, denominations, taxonomy—don’t need to exist, where two people could be umbilically attached and if one person moved too far away something would snap and the other would hemorrhage. (see: diary of a lover girl)
Victims of the left-handed trainee cupid (God help you) suffer the solipsism of unrequited love. Your love at last sight, she wasn’t even close to being your whole world, but she was almost your hope for heaven. Not being loved is not the problem, the problem is that the world continued exactly as it did before, as though nothing had changed although everything had changed.
In idle moments, where memory meets imagination halfway, where old reveries pile on top of one another like copulating beetles, you carefully bring that fantasy out from the shadow like a candle kept lit behind cupped hands so your infinite capacity for illusion can get to work, beautifying it until your nerves can no longer tell the difference between love received and love imagined. Unrequited love is not heartbreak: nothing breaks, but everything unravels. The itch of yearning comes from self-deception.
When did it happen? When did admiration become affection? Affection become need? Need become eager, incurable, dyed-in-the-wool yearning?
Love in your late teens or early twenties—whatever you consider immature—is often marked with a fierceness that can destroy adult lives. You’d survive, but the poison is in the wound and the wound would stay open, leaving you susceptible to an infection that feels like a feverish spell that can only be broken by reincarnating that prototype in another, every person a palimpsestic copy of the last. Each time you happen to me all over again, said Edith Wharton.