Static I Called Love

“Love one another, but make not a bond of love.” — Khalil Gibran.

I remember being certain that I had found the right person. Once. Twice. Three times. Or four, I’m not entirely sure. In theory, everything is perfect. Passion is just a physical reaction, an anomaly, something inevitable, simply because we are too human not to feel. And sometimes that adrenaline of falling in love, again and again, made me confuse lust with love.

What is lust? Passion? It is that desire in its cleanest and most hungry state. It is that feeling, that electricity that runs through your body and makes your skin prickle when someone looks at you differently. And all of that before any touch even happens. It is wanting that person, here and now. It is noise, that sound that gives you anxiety and makes your chest ache from how loudly your heart is beating. But does love fit inside that adrenaline? Inside that deafening noise? Because it may be intense, something that draws attention and makes you want more, but it does not go beyond that. It is nothing more than a great noise that, in the end, is not music.

Throughout my life, I had models of love around me. My foundation was my father’s disappearance and my mother’s failed relationships that followed. Those men, in general, were always too intense, too aggressive, too drunk, and they made me afraid of any kind of contact, whether physical or emotional. On the other hand, I had my uncles, who through my childhood lens were the perfect couple. Communicative, calm, loving. They were everything I believed a real-life fairytale should be. Look how ironic it was to grow up and realize they had been two great actors my entire life, and that their marriage was a pile of flaws, betrayals, and contradictions. Is love that, then? Two imperfect beings choosing each other every day? I always believed that. But seeing their relationship through my now adult lens made me realize that it was more convenience than love in fact. It is comfortable to be with someone who already knows you, and who forgives you every day simply because they also need to be forgiven. So it is more comfortable to call it love than to face the fear of starting from zero.

Anyway, when I truly fell in love, everyone said I was too young to know anything about love. And I will not say, in any way, that they were wrong. I was young, naïve, and believed I was living something beautiful.

I had a few situations. As deplorable as the things I wrote about them. I have been deceived, and I am not ashamed to admit that. I have been afraid, and I have also been deeply arrogant with some men before. I once lived a relationship so toxic that when I ended it and heard someone who claimed to love me say he would end his life if I did not take him back, I thought I had made the biggest mistake. I am young, already an adult, but still young, and I do not know many things. The only thing I know is that nothing I ever had compared to what I felt for a certain man once.

And no, this is not one of those beautiful stories where the protagonist suffers and finally finds true love. No, far from it. This story is far from being about true love, or about believing in love again. I am still a skeptic, and despite the intensity of what I lived, I state that it was all lust and not love.

Age was never a concern for him, although for everyone else it was the most complicated subject between us. Somehow, I was too blind to question it. I believed it was love, that it was transcendental. I liked just sitting beside him and noticing every gesture he made while speaking that no one else paid attention to. I liked how we could spend hours talking and creating an entire universe just for us, two people who wanted to be understood. I think I convinced myself that I was just as broken as he was, and that we were each other’s salvation in a world doomed to falseness.

He would tell me beautiful things. Sentences that seemed to have come out of a Noir novel. He was a man who carried a sad look, like someone who has been standing at a station for a long time mourning the train he missed. He told me that the anxiety I felt was not anxiety but adrenaline. And that in love, that was normal.

At the time, I felt seen, loved in a distorted way. I even came to believe that no one would ever love me again and that connections like that did not happen twice. If we were broken, it was only a matter of time and persistence until we fixed ourselves.

So why did it take years for me to finally wake up and realize that the one breaking me was him? And that I was simply allowing it to happen, without lifting a finger to stop it. He would not listen when I argued. He would just tell me I was brave and that everything would be fine.

When he left, as if he had never been here at all, I felt like I could die and it would make no difference. I felt like a ghost in my own house, and I had no idea how to exist without his presence. I wished he were there, that he would look at me, desire me, choose me, change for me. I would wake up crying, missing our late-night fights about him quitting smoking. But none of that ever happened again.

Two years later, I had managed to build a life without him. Or I thought I had. That was until he appeared again. He seemed different, or at least that is what I thought at the time, even though deep down I knew nothing had changed and that he would always be that way. He was still the man who destroyed my reputation, my dreams, and what I believed to be a home. He was chaos, and I did not want to clean up the mess he always made when he returned.

After everything that had happened, I truly believed he had some consideration for me, no matter how small. I think he himself confused everything with love, and he did not accept my tears nor my words. And my words are all I have at this moment.

He looks at me as if it were my fault. As if I were fake and my words were lies. As if every time I welcomed him and pretended it did not hurt me, I had only been a great manipulator in his life.

I think now, after everything that has passed, I can finally say there is no more mess, and that I can breathe without his name in my chest.

I do not quite know the conclusion of this. Maybe I finally understood that I did not love him and that he was only a projection of my fears, traumas, and adolescent confusion. And that in the end, I was only enchanted by a body, trying to fit an invented soul inside it. So it was more about possession. And the woman I am today has decided that love is freedom. It is not about him, who tried to cut my wings and keep me from flying away, it is about someone who understands my dreams and my vision that the ocean is only a puddle compared to them. If it is not meant to make me want to fly higher, I would rather stay alone on the ground.