What If We Never Find True Love...

This is too much.

I can't take it anymore.

This is unfair beyond measure.

In the night, we smash through the crash barriers of ordinary hope.

We're going to do away with ourselves.

They'll regret us.

They'll miss us now.

But we won't, of course, do anything silly.

It's just the mind doing its normal work, adjusting to yet another yawning gap between the way we would want things to be and the horrid way they are.

We settle.

We are, after all, creatures who know how to die.

We think we don't know how to, but we invariably do, whatever the fierce rage.

We can digest pretty much any verdict.

We tell ourselves we'd never endure not being able to speak or losing our bowels, but then the doctors tell us what has to be and we put up with a feeding tube and a bag and being able to communicate only through a quivering eyelid.

It's always better than the alternative.

So, of course, we deal with a cataclysmic lack of love.

Dawn comes chilly and severe and yet reassuring in its sober bleakness.

We make the bed, clear away the despair and get on.

There are a few consolations.

First and foremost, a ravaged, incensed defiance, a fuck you to the universe and all those who peddle sentimental nonsense that doesn't fit our reality.

A certain kind of art works too, the sort created by unflinching genius realists who went through as much loneliness as we have, who understood our sadness ahead of time.

Grief-stricken masters like Baudelaire and Leopardi, Pessoa and Pascal, who can express our petty domestic sorrow in mighty transcendental terms and induct us to the most dignified kind of regret.

They were there too and in the most abstract, accomplished ways tell us, I know.

And we have friendship, not the kind that obliterates the loneliness, but that allows us to commune around it.

We can't help each other directly.

This is too much.

I can't take it anymore.

This is unfair beyond measure.

In the night, we smash through the crash barriers of ordinary hope.

We're going to do away with ourselves.

They'll regret us.

They'll miss us now.

But we won't, of course, do anything silly.

It's just the mind doing its normal work, adjusting to yet another yawning gap between the way we would want things to be and the horrid way they are.

We settle.

We are, after all, creatures who know how to die.

We think we don't know how to, but we invariably do, whatever the fierce rage.

We can digest pretty much any verdict.

We tell ourselves we'd never endure not being able to speak or losing our bowels, but then the doctors tell us what has to be and we put up with a feeding tube and a bag and being able to communicate only through a quivering eyelid.

It's always better than the alternative.

So, of course, we deal with a cataclysmic lack of love.

Dawn comes chilly and severe and yet reassuring in its sober bleakness.

We make the bed, clear away the despair and get on.

There are a few consolations.

First and foremost, a ravaged, incensed defiance, a fuck you to the universe and all those who peddle sentimental nonsense that doesn't fit our reality.

A certain kind of art works too, the sort created by unflinching genius realists who went through as much loneliness as we have, who understood our sadness ahead of time.

Grief-stricken masters like Baudelaire and Leopardi, Pessoa and Pascal, who can express our petty domestic sorrow in mighty transcendental terms and induct us to the most dignified kind of regret.

They were there too and in the most abstract, accomplished ways tell us, I know.

And we have friendship, not the kind that obliterates the loneliness, but that allows us to commune around it.

We can't help each other directly.