A Long Walk

I used to be afraid of love. I think it was because I was worried that peoples' hearts ran out. I didn't think that they meant for them to run out, they just did, like in the old days when people drank from wells until they dried up and then they moved on. That was back when I thought that people getting divorced was one of the more natural things that happened. When I was young, I sat on the stairs outside my parents room and listened to them shout things. I thought they were getting divorced, but now I know they were just being people. I don't even know what they were upset about, honestly, but it doesn't really matter anyways. If I could go back, I would sit outside their door and listen and then sneak away with some more assurance of how much they loved each other. I think you have to feel deeply about someone or something to shout about it. Or just be really annoyed. Maybe what I mean by that is that there isn't a set of behaviours that let you know that you love someone. I think you just love them. Like when someone asks you why you love eating macaroni and cheese or being naked in water. All you can say is that you do. Or at least that's how it seems to me. I think that when people say that they love each other, they mean that they want to be people together. That's why its dumb to marry someone so you can have sex. You could have sex with anyone, but you can't be people with anyone. You can't want to know everything there is to know about anyone. In fact, I think that loving someone might mean not wanting to stop knowing them. Knowing is a verb, and I think its dumb that people assume that knowing implies finality. That's like saying that the verb walking implies getting somewhere and stopping. In the "Paradiso", a book I haven't read but have heard about, Dante makes the highest level of heaven a place where people are looking further and further into God, and knowing more and more about Him, without end. People aren't God, but I think that wanting to love someone is wanting to be people with them which is wanting to know them. Not know about them, but know them. There is a long walk between me and being in love with someone. That's how its always been. I've said that I loved people that I haven't loved, and if I could go back I would say what I meant, which was that I thought that I wanted to try to love them, but sometimes it's hard to say what I mean, just like its hard to swim in a straight line or hear that you won't see your grandfather again. One time, I carried the biggest rock I could find up a mountain in New York. It doesn't matter how big it was. What matters is that I used to think that love was like that, that it was something you carried around with you and you knew where it was going and that you could take it there. I don't think that anymore.
        When I'm old, I want to own a cabin. I won't spend much on the cabin, just enough to make it somewhere that I want to be. Instead, I'll buy as much land as I can. I'll walk around and through and over it. I'll watch it change shape and grow and suffer and bloom. I'll love that land.