Love Sculpture by Robert Indiana
So irresponsible of me but I love the feeling. I love the fall and the struggle and the mooning, long languid hours dreaming of the beloved's face and torso. I have been loving and learning, breaking hearts and getting mine broken in the process since kindergarten, well, consciously since teenage-hood, but that's still pretty darn long to learn something that I still can't sum up in a paragraph without getting tongue tied, confused and lost.
My capacity to love has grown with each experience but so has my ability to disengage, I've also widened the pool of possibilities to the point that my younger self would find bewildering to say the least. And I still haven't found that magic formula where everything clicks into place, and it just feels right.
This entry is gonna be a barrage of lines borrowed from cheesy love songs but seriously, I haven't found out how to separate love and tears, and I'm not sure I trust a love that doesn't hurt, that doesn't come in a vale of sobs and charged emotion. I've been in "adult" relationships. I've started out as 'friends" (well not really, I've never deluded myself enough to befriend someone I have the hots for, who has that kind of discipline?). I've rolled my eyes at other people's drama and told them to grow up, all superior in my rational, scientific "this is hormone-induced madness" moments. That kinda lucidity rarely lasts long though and is no fun at all. Productivity be damned, besides, blogs and poems and doodles of his face in a giant heart is creative and is a valid contribution to humanity I am sure.
I don't know how to feel about this sculpture though. I love it and I hate it. Kinda like I feel about all the people I've been romantically involved with over the years.(If I'm gonna be super honest, it applies to anyone I've felt a damn thing for, friends and family alike). It's commercial, obvious, redundant, and yet... and yet... classic somehow.
How do you tell someone you feel something without falling into that trap? How do you do it without being sappy or drippy or hysterical, and why in God's name would you want to? Do you atrophy inside if you don't express your love? Do you do it for confirmation, is it a passive-aggressive reflex, a bartering chip for all you emotional-blackmailers out there? I loved you you idiot and you threw it all away. I've been on the giving and receiving end of this sentiment several times (on a disturbingly frequent basis this past year). Always the same but different; full of hope, full of familiarity, desire and despair.
Excuse me New York, but I don't see none of that dark stuff in this damn sculpture.
"Cat Among the Pigeons"
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