2011
hello future reader:
maybe your life is centuries after the end of mine, and i wonder about you. right now, in 2011, parts of humanity see the human race (as we know it) as the product of evolution and luck--and there are many who deny that, and believe in creationism (look it up—it’s a big deal here, now). that is not why i'm writing, though i do find it moving: understanding we are just the lucky ones--the ones that survived.
there are many things you must wonder about us, absent any direct instruction and relying upon your own interpretation of those traces of us that you wind up finding. so i want to tell you one specific thing about us. but first: do you have love? it doesn’t seem particularly relevant, love, in terms of reproduction and perpetuation of the species—maybe by the time you are reading this, love will have been selected against altogether… . do you know romeo and juliet? (look it up—it’s a good one). basically, (spoiler alert) familial and romantic love can, tragically, lead to death—so you know, it could happen that over hundreds, thousands, millions (?) of years, love will have been selected against. by the time you are reading this, perhaps a biological weakness has died out, a behavior that jeopardizes survival of the species has become unviable and vanishes: and so your lovelessness is an adaptation resulting from selective pressure and competition. anyway, maybe it has, and maybe it hasn’t occurred, but (perhaps hypothetically): do you know what it is like to lose love? i'm going to give you some direct instruction on that, because it is very important.
i am sure you must have found documentation of the kinds of love we feel now, in all of their variety. people are becoming more comfortable discussing the ins and outs of all kinds of loving, which is a step forward for us--at least in my opinion. and if you have love, you probably have love falling apart, but you may crumble in entirely different ways than we do now--and if you don't have love, then how can you know the crumble at all? let's explore the crumbling.
so this is a story of love falling apart in a very 2011-human way. it may or may not be fiction (do you know fiction?). it is written for historical documentation, and whether it is ultimately fiction or not is irrelevant—this is a good description of heartbreak in many--but not all--parts of the world these days.
assuming you do not have love, i’ll tell you: love starts out like a baby being born. (i don't know if you know what being born is, or how you reproduce, and if i start getting all side tracked with explaining all the back story of this it'll take me forever, so forgive me, please.) the moment the baby begins living outside the womb, the reality is that this freshly baked newborn is drawing closer to death. that is how love is--it's the birth of a new being that has a life and a lifetime of its own, and the joy and elation and exhaustion and overemotion of the two beings who produced this bundle of joy simply spill out at first, and then slowly settle down. between the two lovers there is still much happiness as their love-baby grows and matures, and there is little disruption in that happiness. and then one day, one of the two people in the original pair comes home from work and swipes his finger over the towel bar and announces that the other one missed a spot while cleaning. and there we see it: the aging of the love. the first tiny teeny little crazing has happened--very faint, very trivial, but there.
and, if the two are still together after that little event, there is more happiness and more crazing: between the lovers, the lacks are spotlighted: one is a poor role model for the children, one is falling down on “the job”, and the insults and the coldness grow and then one day, one finds the diary of the other and reads it, and the aging turns in to a physically disabling illness, and professional help is sought. and the treatment sessions occur and occur and occur but are, it seems, powerless against the dis-ease that has settled in the bones of that fragile body of love.
and then one october day, during a particularly bad marital counseling session, one bemoans a lack of respect and the other one yells that he is doing all the heavy lifting and she is not carrying her weight in their common daily life. and he is sick of her excuses. and he strides from their session early, slamming the door.
hello future reader:
maybe your life is centuries after the end of mine, and i wonder about you. right now, in 2011, parts of humanity see the human race (as we know it) as the product of evolution and luck--and there are many who deny that, and believe in creationism (look it up—it’s a big deal here, now). that is not why i'm writing, though i do find it moving: understanding we are just the lucky ones--the ones that survived.
there are many things you must wonder about us, absent any direct instruction and relying upon your own interpretation of those traces of us that you wind up finding. so i want to tell you one specific thing about us. but first: do you have love? it doesn’t seem particularly relevant, love, in terms of reproduction and perpetuation of the species—maybe by the time you are reading this, love will have been selected against altogether… . do you know romeo and juliet? (look it up—it’s a good one). basically, (spoiler alert) familial and romantic love can, tragically, lead to death—so you know, it could happen that over hundreds, thousands, millions (?) of years, love will have been selected against. by the time you are reading this, perhaps a biological weakness has died out, a behavior that jeopardizes survival of the species has become unviable and vanishes: and so your lovelessness is an adaptation resulting from selective pressure and competition. anyway, maybe it has, and maybe it hasn’t occurred, but (perhaps hypothetically): do you know what it is like to lose love? i'm going to give you some direct instruction on that, because it is very important.
i am sure you must have found documentation of the kinds of love we feel now, in all of their variety. people are becoming more comfortable discussing the ins and outs of all kinds of loving, which is a step forward for us--at least in my opinion. and if you have love, you probably have love falling apart, but you may crumble in entirely different ways than we do now--and if you don't have love, then how can you know the crumble at all? let's explore the crumbling.
so this is a story of love falling apart in a very 2011-human way. it may or may not be fiction (do you know fiction?). it is written for historical documentation, and whether it is ultimately fiction or not is irrelevant—this is a good description of heartbreak in many--but not all--parts of the world these days.
assuming you do not have love, i’ll tell you: love starts out like a baby being born. (i don't know if you know what being born is, or how you reproduce, and if i start getting all side tracked with explaining all the back story of this it'll take me forever, so forgive me, please.) the moment the baby begins living outside the womb, the reality is that this freshly baked newborn is drawing closer to death. that is how love is--it's the birth of a new being that has a life and a lifetime of its own, and the joy and elation and exhaustion and overemotion of the two beings who produced this bundle of joy simply spill out at first, and then slowly settle down. between the two lovers there is still much happiness as their love-baby grows and matures, and there is little disruption in that happiness. and then one day, one of the two people in the original pair comes home from work and swipes his finger over the towel bar and announces that the other one missed a spot while cleaning. and there we see it: the aging of the love. the first tiny teeny little crazing has happened--very faint, very trivial, but there.
and, if the two are still together after that little event, there is more happiness and more crazing: between the lovers, the lacks are spotlighted: one is a poor role model for the children, one is falling down on “the job”, and the insults and the coldness grow and then one day, one finds the diary of the other and reads it, and the aging turns in to a physically disabling illness, and professional help is sought. and the treatment sessions occur and occur and occur but are, it seems, powerless against the dis-ease that has settled in the bones of that fragile body of love.
and then one october day, during a particularly bad marital counseling session, one bemoans a lack of respect and the other one yells that he is doing all the heavy lifting and she is not carrying her weight in their common daily life. and he is sick of her excuses. and he strides from their session early, slamming the door.
now, at this moment: their body of love slips into a coma.
(do you know coma? it is the state of being there, but not living. existing. and with a coma, eventually there will have to be a decision made: to pull the plug, or to keep hoping and waiting to get the body to come back to life.)
so the love is in a coma. and on this very day, after so many years of nurturing that body, trying to feed it and attend to it and keep it healthy, on this day she leaves the therapist's office in a state of shock, because she had done everything that she could and had given her best to make something strong, and after all this lifetime of that, she saw that body lying there anyway, and saw that she had never been enough. but she was yet not willing to pull the plug on that thing she had helped create. it was too soon. instead, on the drive home, she unbuckles her seat belt, presses the accelerator, and points the car straight at the concrete wall made by the freeway overpass above her. then she pulls herself back on track, after an image of her kids flits through her head.
it turns out she herself isn't hospitalized, though her doctor wants her to be. she insists: she can't be: there are kids to consider and other important things, and so with two medications (big for remediation of all sorts of things, in 2011), and in two months she drags herself through two major holidays, four birthdays and the requisite parties--that she plans and executes, two visits from out of town family (hers, then his), and fills the roles of santa and new years eve festivity planner.
and no one around her knows that she is a shell. everyone is happy and well fed and entertained and no one even notices her absence. (this is significant.) she slips away for naps a lot, and she doesn't laugh ever during this time, but she holds it all together superficially, and no one sees the difference (this is significant.) and then in the first days of january, after all of the important things have taken place, she collapses. eventually in february she gets to her knees again.
and this is when she admits: it will be this relationship, or it will be me. and she realizes: it isn't going to be me.
so the love is in a coma. and on this very day, after so many years of nurturing that body, trying to feed it and attend to it and keep it healthy, on this day she leaves the therapist's office in a state of shock, because she had done everything that she could and had given her best to make something strong, and after all this lifetime of that, she saw that body lying there anyway, and saw that she had never been enough. but she was yet not willing to pull the plug on that thing she had helped create. it was too soon. instead, on the drive home, she unbuckles her seat belt, presses the accelerator, and points the car straight at the concrete wall made by the freeway overpass above her. then she pulls herself back on track, after an image of her kids flits through her head.
it turns out she herself isn't hospitalized, though her doctor wants her to be. she insists: she can't be: there are kids to consider and other important things, and so with two medications (big for remediation of all sorts of things, in 2011), and in two months she drags herself through two major holidays, four birthdays and the requisite parties--that she plans and executes, two visits from out of town family (hers, then his), and fills the roles of santa and new years eve festivity planner.
and no one around her knows that she is a shell. everyone is happy and well fed and entertained and no one even notices her absence. (this is significant.) she slips away for naps a lot, and she doesn't laugh ever during this time, but she holds it all together superficially, and no one sees the difference (this is significant.) and then in the first days of january, after all of the important things have taken place, she collapses. eventually in february she gets to her knees again.
and this is when she admits: it will be this relationship, or it will be me. and she realizes: it isn't going to be me.
so, she has decided, and the plug is pulled. the love-child that had fallen to coma is now, and at what appears to be by her own hand, just a corpse. it doesn't make it easier for her that she made the call. in this case the line between life and death was a formality. it was an announcement.
so, can you see the lifespan of love? its growing up is a slow process, with fits and spurts of polish and ragged edges, just like the life of a person now is. and its end is as the death of a treasured person is, viewed today, as well: first denied and then wished and worked against, and then sudden. and irrevocable.
and so you see how it worked way way back in time, for your human ancestors. not always, of course, but in some cases it was definitely like this. although in this story the she pulled the plug, in some cases the he will have, and in some situations both parties just wander away from their love and it withers and neither care. today there are as many forms of betrayal and endings are there are loves and beginnings, it's true. some love-bodies last entire lifetimes, until the pair die a week apart, because the one left behind can't live on without his or her sweetie pie (not a food in this case, but rather a 21st century term of endearment). but i can vouch, personally promise you, that sometimes it was exactly like this.
what are they like for you, the stages of life for the bodies of love? at all similar? (i am really not at all sure that love hasn't been selected against.)
so, can you see the lifespan of love? its growing up is a slow process, with fits and spurts of polish and ragged edges, just like the life of a person now is. and its end is as the death of a treasured person is, viewed today, as well: first denied and then wished and worked against, and then sudden. and irrevocable.
and so you see how it worked way way back in time, for your human ancestors. not always, of course, but in some cases it was definitely like this. although in this story the she pulled the plug, in some cases the he will have, and in some situations both parties just wander away from their love and it withers and neither care. today there are as many forms of betrayal and endings are there are loves and beginnings, it's true. some love-bodies last entire lifetimes, until the pair die a week apart, because the one left behind can't live on without his or her sweetie pie (not a food in this case, but rather a 21st century term of endearment). but i can vouch, personally promise you, that sometimes it was exactly like this.
what are they like for you, the stages of life for the bodies of love? at all similar? (i am really not at all sure that love hasn't been selected against.)
but really, future reader, i am too sad to describe that, now. you'll have to find a different artifact.
