just us

when I was younger, I remember I used to spend a lot of time wishing I could be someone else. What I mean to say is, I wanted to be everyone, at once. I wanted to know everything, I wanted to see everything, I wanted to kiss every girl and hit every home run and rob every bank and write every book and paint every painting. I wanted to be needed by everyone, all the time, and I wanted to need them back so that I wouldn't be one of those people whose story is already written while they're still young, and who don't die alone when they are old, they die alone when they are young and their bodies keep living for years and years anyways, like those boats that are sometimes in stories where they find it in the middle of the ocean with no crew anywhere. I wanted to love back, I meant to say, and I wanted everything to be so real and alive that you couldn't stop laughing and crying at the same time because if you did, you wouldn't be expressing what you felt honestly enough. I wanted everyone else to have smaller hearts than I did, because I didn't want to hear about anyone being more in love with anything than I was. I don't know why I wanted that. I guess I should feel bad, but I don't, because I think I still want that, only not in the same way, and also because I don't feel bad about too many things anymore. I don't think I'm calloused, because I don't feel calloused, I just feel like I'm taking a few steps each day further into the world I actually live in, and in that world, I've done a lot of bad things and Jesus has forgiven me for them. So anyway, back to wanting to kiss every girl. I don't know if I actually wanted that, although I may have, I think it was that I wanted the faceless girl that always used to climb the trees of my mind, and I'd tell her to come down because I was going to her house for lunch today, which was really just something to tell her to get her to come down because I was just going to take her into my tent like Isaac or whoever and marry her right then, but she wouldn't come down. Maybe she read my mind. I figured it might work even though she wasn't Zaccheus(which I was happy about), and even though I'm not Jesus(which I'm not always happy about, if I were honest). Oh well. So anyway, she never came down, and she's probably still sitting up there, hell if I know, I haven't been back to that tree in awhile. But I used to think that if she came down from her tree, if I found the perfect girl, everything would be safer again, would be easier again, would be better.

these days, I'm happy that there aren't any perfect girls, because, like Voltaire said, the perfect is the enemy of the good, or something like that, and he probably said it in French anyway, but the point is he said something just like that and I think it's true. I think that saying means that we can't really grasp the perfect, but we can go on wanting it forever, and that causes us to miss the good things that are all around us and are able to be better understood and loved than something that's perfect. I'm just talking about girls, so put your heresy pistols away. I took the clips out of them before you walked in the room anyways, just like in those spy movies that excite us because those people are able to control every situation and have things work the way they want them to just by dressing up and shooting people with silenced guns and tanks. the only people that can do that in real life don't actually exist. Sorry. I know you think the government has some secret aces up it's sleeve that it will pull out in our moment of need and save everything we love from everything we hate, but sorry, I don't think they do. I think they're just people like us.

And the girl I marry, if I do get to get married, will just be a people like me too. I don't really need any arguments to back that up, because that's the way the world is. I find it funny that we all expect so much from everything. Not the kind of funny that makes you laugh, the kind that makes you wish things were different than they are. You probably think I'm sinking into cynicism, and on the one hand you should be somewhat supportive of that if only because then you would be able to say "sinking into cynicism" over and over again when you prayed for me and that phrase goes together really nicely, listen to how it sounds when you say it aloud. I'm not sinking into that though. It's funny how love is always compared to an ocean, because I think a lot of people say that without understanding just how right they are. Love is an ocean, and we know less about the ocean than we do about outer space, and we don't even know that much about outer space. I learned today, because I looked it up, that ant eaters can eat 30,000 ants in one day, which, if you do the math like I did, comes out to be 20.833333333 ants per minute for 24 hours straight. Some people talk about love like it's an ant eater, and we know how much it takes from us, and how often, and we can put numbers to it. The problem is, you can't really. That's why, as cheesy as it is (I would say "sounds" instead of "is" but then that would imply that there could be some doubt about whether this metaphor/simile (depending on how it's expressed) has the possibility of not being cheesy, which it doesn't) love is an ocean, because we don't know hardly anything about it and it has fish that are all exoskeleton with lamp-eyes and hollow teeth and it also has whales and it also has starfish and sharks and leviathans and turtles and jellyfish(which have stung me) and dolphins and tuna and all sorts of stuff, and all sorts of stuff that we haven't found yet, and we don't want to float around on the surface, we want love to drown us. Don't you? I want it to drown me, in the way that Frost meant when he pleaded May no fate willfully misunderstand me and half grant what I wish and snatch me away. I can't find any arrangement of words that says it better than he said it right there, and I don't care anyway because it's always more important what was said than who said it. I wish more people saw that.

Someday, I hope, someone is going to breath real love into my lungs and I'll breathe it into theirs, and we will be real people who fight and run around in the grass and climb trees and drink and write books and paint each other's faces and rob banks and write music together and it will last as long as the Lord lets it last. I guess we live in a world where we want to love each other and we also die, and I don't really understand that but I'm ok with it now. I don't squirm in my seat any more, waiting for the bell to ring for my next class/station in life. I'm just me, and I'm excited to marry someone who is just themselves.