36 Love
36
Love
Tristan
It feels like there are two forces brutally pulling my organs in opposite directions. Not all my organs. Just my heart, my lungs, and my stomach. Sometimes my liver too. I live in a constant arrhythmia, in a dance between the “I’m done” and “I love her too much.” Between the not-at-all-liberating mouthful of air that fills me when I suck in oxygen, pressed into her neck, in bed, or when I wake up, and the suffocating oppression of feeling like I’m alone. And there are echoes everywhere. I’ve lost weight. I don’t know how much. I don’t weigh myself, I don’t really care, but I can see it in how my clothes fit and in the mirror; my face is gaunt. I’ve been told at work and even in court. I think I’m internalizing all this shit and starting to look sick. Madrid makes me sick. It’s not her, it’s not our relationship, which is sick too, it’s Madrid. I don’t know. I can definitely feel my liver in the bile that rises up in my throat all the time, especially when I’m filled with rage, when I spit certain words that I don’t feel. Or I feel them, but I don’t mean to say them.
I love her, but this isn’t sustainable.
I love her, but not like this.
In this context, “like this” has a lot of faces. It’s a ten-sided decahedron. “Like this” means “here,” in the most concrete sense of space. I’ve built up a visceral hatred for this apartment I used to like so much. I don’t understand why, considering my salary, I have to live in fifty square meters without even the option of stepping out onto a little balcony. With our salaries. But that’s Madrid. And that’s where the other face of “here” comes in. I can’t handle this city full of lights, music, and life. For me, it’s nothing more than a cacophony of honking horns and exhaust pipes, rushing around, and constant pressure on my temples. I can’t be objective. It’s not Madrid’s fault. It’s just that Madrid isn’t my home, and I’ve never been able to turn this city into my home. I’m the problem.
“Like this” also means time, and time is unfurling like a fan with many different nuances. Five years have passed since we met: I need to move forward, to feel like what we have is growing and it’s not just frozen like an eternal love waiting for something, who knows what. I don’t even know if that something exists. Still, I’ve realized at this point that getting married isn’t going to fix anything, and neither will having kids, because…that’s where the other nuance of time comes in: there’s already too much for the hours we have in a day. Her work is a ravenous baby constantly suckling at her tit. And mine. Her world, the whole thing (family, friends, work, interests, downtime) is an industrial machine, a monster that gobbles up time with its mouth full. And compared to her, I’m the workshop of a medieval carpenter. And she’s not the problem. The problem is that she has a life, and the only thing I’ve managed to carve out here is her. And that… There’s no way out of that.
“Like this” is also the state of our emotional health. We’re in the red. We haven’t had any time to dedicate to loving each other. We lack tenderness, probably out of shame. We live in a time of extremes: either you belong to the half that practices emotional pornography or the half that feels shame expressing his own emotions tenderly. I’m a blockhead incapable of telling my girlfriend that I love her so much that sometimes it doesn’t fit in my chest. I can never find the words to express it.
“Like this,” finally, is also the hidden face of the moon that I’ve turned into. She’s the earth; I’m her satellite. And suddenly, I find myself loving her so much that I hate her, because I don’t understand why, even though she loves me, she doesn’t want the same things I do.
But I still have enough awareness to know, not “like this.” It shouldn’t be like this. It doesn’t deserve to be like this. I don’t deserve it like this. Love is not like this.