Thursday, October 27, 2011 @ 11:52 PM
"I believe that two people can last together. Through disagreements and accidents and those little things that somehow manage to gather between us - part time jobs and time, mountains, rivers, all the unmaterialized dreams, all the sloppy hopes, the numbers and the words and the miles and the things we always swore we’d do but never did. Those things don’t matter. They never did. Sometimes we let them because it’s easier that way. To blame loss on anything but our own selves, right? My god, why is that so hard? To take the blame for letting go of something that had potential. It’s hard to not say it was distance or loneliness or just the irrefutable fact that “We wanted two different things” — like sacrificing for something greater is now suddenly equivalent to compromising for something worthless. We use these things as excuses for why we just couldn’t do it anymore. Why we just had to give up. Maybe because we were tired, or we just got scared. Because we didn’t want to feel so lonely anymore. Maybe because it’s so much easier to just start over again with somebody else.
It’s hard to try to fix things with your own hands. It’s hard to build that lost momentum. It requires a fight for something we believe to be lost, work and patience. A certain amount of energy and a certain amount of struggle. It means we have to believe that we can build something transcendent with the parts we were given. It means we have to find it in ourselves to want someone through our own faulted expectations, through the ugly things and the messiness of time or that unpredictable quality of trust. It means that when someone finally lets go of all their static fantasies about love we have to stop calling that “settling” and start seeing it for what it really is: wanting someone even when they’re not who you thought you wanted them to be. It means accepting that this person you’ve invested all this time into is in fact a living and breathing thing; not an idea that you can twist and turn when it gets old and worn. That they are full of their own distinct perceptions of this place you both collided in — and sometimes theirs just won’t be the same as yours.
But that’s when it’s easy to just call it all off. When you just can’t keep pretending they’re everything you thought. And it’s too hard to change for somebody in the small ways we sometimes need to change. Yeah, that’s right. I think that sometimes it’s not so fucking awful to make sacrifices for the people that we love. That’s not called settling, it’s called being selfless for once in our stupid selfish lives. Our selfish lives where we spend all our time coveting things from people who we decide aren’t good enough on a whim, where it’s always about what we want and not anyone else. It’s not “settling” if you choose to be unguarded for someone who will hold all your dark and sad parts and not just call them yours but instead “ours”.
And it is true that some people just aren’t meant for that. Sometimes shit happens and the whole thing was just a mistake built off a preliminary mistake that we tried our hardest to look at like it was something much prettier once. Sometimes we fool ourselves into thinking someone was this strange and beautiful thing we later realize they never were from the start, and we move on from them to look for someone worth all those sad mistakes that we pined for before. But most of the times it is is our own fault. Most of the time it is our own selfishness, our guardedness, it is all those stupid people who told us that love should be effortless, that it should materialize out of nowhere and never be hard or require change. People always change. And that’s what’s so hard, right? People are always fucking changing. And sometimes they don’t leave room for us when they do, sometimes they don’t wait up for us to change too. And that’s so hard, it’s so lonely and afflictive, like we weren’t worth the wait, we weren’t worth the effort. But I think people can change together. And I think the dynamic of their love can change together too. I believe that two people can last through the things that break everyone else into halves."
