0009 – Saturday Morning Musings

It’s been a while. Many things have happened since I last posted, mostly this general vibe of not being lucid since early February, maybe late January, maybe the start of the year. Writing this after so long because I need to get this out of my head and a tweet is too little for the context, and talking is… hard. I also want you to read this.

I’m listening to some vocaloid songs right now. Last night I played a few old songs like Can’t Help Falling In Love With You on the guitar, a thing that only happen once in a while. The guitar part. Also, just like every other day in the last month or so, I’ve had this girl I’m talking to in my head 24/7. She’s cute, she’s smart, she’s a little sheltered and her life seemingly stuck inside a hostile environment that’s not meant for her. She got guts, and she have a self awareness that’s reminiscent of my friends on TPOT. She laugh heartedly and smile with a full grin on her lips, and her shyness is something I adore.

Relationships are not my forte. I hold a very loose “fire and forget” style to handling friendships, in that, I am willing to make things work but both of us should be aware that we are fully functioning conscious adult with agency and if both side doesn’t find the friendship to be worth the work, then we can just let go. I also understand that the modern adult life ask for a lot in one person individually and sometime that means that you barely have any space for yourself, let alone another fully formed person, in your life. An Adult Friendships, as I call it. I hold on to the notion that even those that I have drifted apart with are still my friends, and that it’s just a matter of the world not giving us a chance to intersect.

But this doesn’t work in relationships.
I can’t just let go when things are rough.
I don’t want to let go just because things are rocky.

I don’t know what makes relationship work. I know why it fails, failure in communication, loss of trust, inability to compromise, etc etc, but I don’t really know how to do a relationship. I know what healthy relationships looks like. Thankfully my parents and their friends shows at least a decent image of how it looks like to some deeper than surface level extent, but it doesn’t really explain the inner working.

Loving someone, and in this specifically, romantically loving someone with the desire for a relationship, is sorta an active choice. Infatuations may spark the fire of love, but only through deliberate effort does it bloom into love. Love is the time you actively spend with another person, because love is more than just the words you say, more than the fleeting flow of dopamine, it is the willingness to stick through things when things are hard. Love is More Than Word (like that Westlife song my mum forced me to learn when I was little and now is a song I cannot ever forget the chords to).

But it is definitely easier said than done. There are so many part of me conflicted in how I should go about this, because they all map to different needs and desires and risk assessment and even completely different aesthetical positioning. I contain multitudes and all that. I want to love her with all my heart because that is how I believe love should be. I want to take it slow and prod how the relationship dynamics evolve because that’s the rational thing to do. I want to run away because a part of me believe that she’s too nice for me and that I should only stay in order to temporarily give her the leg up until she can find someone who fits her better. I want to fight that guy who think that she’s too nice for me because that means I don’t trust her enough even though I do trust her enough I’m just afraid of the chance that I might be rejected or that the deepest part of me can’t be loved. I want to give her all the time she needs and honour her wants to take things slow and maybe explore other options because I value what people say and want to make a precedent that words mean what they mean, but I also want to hold her tight because I think the words she’s saying is vulnerability veiled in a cloak of protection and I want to show her that at least with me she doesn’t have to hide herself. I want to show her my strong side and be able to fulfil all her needs, but I also want to show my weak side because I too need some part of myself accepted. Maybe this is not meant to be. Maybe this is just the hardship of relationship that I need to go through. I DON’T KNOW WHICH ONE IT IS.

And look, yes, it’s only been two month. I can already hear my inner critics AND the external critics telling me to take some time. But I can’t. Someone neuter my head and my heart. It hurts. I want to do something. I want to make sure that it works. I want to make sure that it works in the meta sense, as in that even if the relationship doesn’t work, I want to do this without any regrets. I want to be able to say that I’ve done my best in this relationship. I want to make it work, but I also understand that a relationship doesn’t work if the other side doesn’t also want to make it work.

I am like water, in that while I am capable of shifting into any shape depending on the container I am in, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have other characteristics that define who I am. Water are heavy, basically impossible to compress, will expand if frozen, and can evaporate. I’m sure you’re smart enough to connect those two.

But alas.
Maybe like everything else.

I just need to be patient.

Other Notes