break, my heart, for i must hold my tongue

How
is it possible that we can ignore or throw away potentially good,
loving relationships for a person with whom we have no idea loves us
back or not – and yet crave to be loved, sometimes by anyone or
everyone?

You
think about things like this when you’re home alone doing nothing.
On the other hand, we think about things like this even while we’re
neck-deep in all this shit we call work.

Well,
there’s no answer to this, is there. We just do it. It just
happens. And we don’t know why! Aye, there’s the rub...
Sometimes we do it ourselves to other people, and when it happens to
us, we can’t believe it.

I
think we’re idealists and hopeless romantics, all. We do not
entertain or give ourselves – our love to people who we do not
really want for the sake of our one true love. Now who exactly our
one true love is, is a fucking mystery. We can say that we have
already met them and perhaps fancy ourselves as having fallen in
love. Maybe. The truth is, if someone ever asks me, I’d have
enough cheek to say yes! I have met him, the one man I want to be
with for the rest of my life. And I am so in love with him, and even
if he doesn’t love me in the same way, he loves me nonetheless.

Yeah.

You
may ask me, if I think he really loves me, then why don’t I just go
for it? Why don’t I just go ahead and take the plunge and tell him
how I really feel? Why don’t I just fucking kiss him in the car
before we part for the night?

Because
I can’t. Because I’m too chickenshit to do anything. I’m too
afraid that if I do anything of the sort, I would lose him as a
friend. And if that happens, I will die. I really will. The thing
is, I can endure not doing anything as long as it would mean that I
would have him in my life. I can keep silent as long as I remain
important, as long as I matter to him, as long as I have his respect
and friendship. I can go on loving only him for the rest of my life,
and yet hold my peace.

But
what of the people that you meet? Young men who seem nice enough,
who seem that they will be good to you if only you’d let them? In
an effort to “move on”, you go out with them, entertain them for
a while, but you don’t completely give yourself. And when you
think things are starting to get serious, you back off. You say to
yourself that this is just another “lost soul”, this is just
another guy who you will forget about - or who will forget you - in the next two weeks. Or in
the next twenty-four hours.

How
is it possible that you can love one person and be the better for it,
and yet be cold, callous and even decadent in dealing with other
people’s feelings?

Some
people say that we should never settle when it comes to love – that
if we have an ideal, it’s ok to seek it, to save yourself for that
person and give it your all when you have the chance. When you look
at it that way, it would appear that there is absolutely nothing
wrong with what I’m doing. Or not doing, for that matter. On the
other hand, is it depriving oneself when you let other promising
young men slip through your fingers because of this unattainable one
true love? If so, then does it follow that “not settling” means
that you hurt yourself more than these people? Then, if so, people
such as me do not have love in their lives because we do not want to
have love in their lives?

Doesn’t
it seem counter-intuitive or something? Makes you think you’re
stupid after all your years of so-called experience.

At
this point, I shall say to myself that I must keep the faith,
patience is a virtue, good things will come to those who wait and all
those other feel-good sayings that we keep close to our hearts when
logic fails us. That is, until you get bored with your own angst and
go out again, living your life as if you had never met your one true
love in the crystal palace. Then you meet the inevitable nice young
man and go through the inevitable cycle of fooling yourself that you
can forget your one true love for just one moment and pretend that you’ll be fine
but you’ll never be fine because you’re in love with him and you
cannot cannot love this nice young man and you’re going to stop
seeing him stop texting him stop calling him stop thinking about him
and the second you receive a text from the man you love everything is
wiped clean as if the nice young man never happened and you say to
yourself again for the nth time that yes, this is the man you love –
the man you want to be with for the rest of your life.