Three Weeks Later

A Thought Train:

Happiness to pain to enjoyable pain? I don’t know but that seems to be my progression. It is truly as if the pain I feel has always been the most real thing, the landscape on which all other events take place. I don’t know what it indicates: my lack of success or that pain really is more real than pleasure.

She is a new landscape and a new canvas. The possibilities escape my understanding and I am unaware. She destroys the whole goddamn paradigm with a look. Again and again she does this. ‘Flourishing’, that’s the word. In the world Jane made for me, I am actually pursuing happiness. I’m not following a theory of what I think happiness should be. I am not the product of my history. I am the product of her: she actualizes me, takes me from floating possibilities to one cohesive whole.

When a theory, or hope, long considered ‘probably true’ turns to reality, it is still an astonishing event. Oddly enough, I reacted unlike I have of late: I was myself. I didn’t worry about how my words were being received. I knew that they were finding a home and that was enough. I was finding a home. A place of comfort and familiarity, typically called a ‘home’, right? I am at home wherever I am at, as long as it is with her.

I don’t know what I expect from myself. I don’t know what she is thinking. All I know is that this the first time I have felt alive in a very long time. And it’s her. I don’t have to translate my words before speaking. I don’t have to worry about loss of interest. I don’t have to worry that I am speaking with a person who cares. I don’t have to worry about being myself.

Pain does settle in around the edges, never seriously breaching the happiness. My joy – Our Joy – is there. It cannot be touched by any outside influence. It’s been said that connections like these – rooted in a spiritual, mental connection – are rare. I know it to be true, but, still, it is bizarre and I think counterintuitive. We are rational, emotional animals. At the forefront of the former is of course our ability to Reason, and, the latter is some combination of Love/Empathy/Compassion. So, if we are naturally animals who have as our essential characteristics the ability to think critically at high levels and the ability to love, why is it so difficult to reach people, to experience people on these levels? Why are we so eager to take the impostor over the real thing? How can we not know the difference? I don’t understand how the lie is told, and I don’t understand how others don’t have the same voice nagging at them, exhorting them to do the right thing.

There is an incredible capacity for recognizing Beauty, but at what point is the line blurred between “Beauty” and just liking something on a completely superficial basis. Is the guy who only goes home with 'dimes' or ‘nines’ a lover of Beauty? I don’t think so. This is why we have proper and common nouns. He likes beautiful women, he does not love Beauty. Beauty is found all over the place – the cloud formations we anthropomorphize as we stare out the car window, the happy eyes of a laughing child, the realization that We are a crack in the massive pavement that is society.

Beauty is not strictly sensory. The way she moves her hands as she speaks, conducting her words to work in the exact manner she wishes. Yes, I am viewing the act with my eyes. You got me. But what my eyes take in isn’t purely beautiful, it needs language to accompany it. And the words. Spoken with honesty and intelligence, her whole face is involved…there is no filter – from her earnest, unflinching blue eyes to her huge radiant smile. She does not hold back. She is both startling and completely matter of fact. How could she be so unique? How could she live in this world and turn out the way she did? How could she be anything other than this?

I don’t think there are answers to these questions, but the fact that they exist at all is the most unexpected, joyous plot twist of my life.