the still point of a turning world

23

i talk a good game about not needing anyone, and how i want to go it alone. but sometimes i feel like i’m trying to convince myself more than anyone else. 

there are days when i feel like i really can do it, that i can live my life without needing to be with someone to be happy. (haven’t you heard? you have to be happy yourself first, before you can be happy with someone else.) there’s so much to see and do in this world, so much i want to accomplish for myself. and in many respects it woud be easier to do it alone. or if not necessarily alone, without tying my life to someone else. my life, as i see it, has barely begun, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense to share it with another person before i figure out how to share it with myself. because there’s also so much that i don’t know about myself, where i want to be, what kind of person i want to become. and there’s so much that i want to give of myself. how much of myself can i give when not all of it is mine to give? 

there are days when i feel like it’s enough. it’s enough to surround myself with friends who love me and whom i love. who make me happy. to know that there are people i can turn to when i need someone to bear my burdens for a little while. i don’t have to spend every waking moment with them to know that they’re there. 

there are days when secretly, i can feel superior to those people who NEED to be in a relationship for their lives to be worthwhile. because i don’t need another person to give me a reason to live, or to love the life i am living.

and then there are days when i feel so inescapably lonely. days when all i crave is a hand to hold in mine, a head leaning on my shoulder, arms to wrap myself up in in the middle of the night, a bed that isn’t empty when i wake up in the morning. a song for my heart to sing, and ears to hear it. someone to love me, and someone for me to love. 

there are days when i fear i’ll never find the one, and i’m doomed to spend the rest of my life alone. the sad bachelor sitting in the corner at all of my friends’ weddings, hoping for respite in the glass i’m holding and not getting it. i fear being left behind, watching everyone around me find their happiness and grasping vicariously for my own. 

there are days when i feel like the one i would have gladly spent the rest of my life with is forever out of my grasp. when i wish i had said, or done, something. anything. when i could have. 

but the truth is, when you’re special, sometimes you have to get used to going it alone. 

if you wait for the right time, what are you hoping for? 

“we’d often go to the movies. we’d shiver as the screen lit up. but more often, madeleine and i would be disappointed. more often we’d be disappointed. the images flickered. marilyn monroe looked terribly old. it saddened us. it wasn’t the film we had dreamed, the film we all carried in our hearts, the film we wanted to make… and secretly wanted to live.”

masculin féminin (1966), jean-luc godard

—

a hopeless romantic with a penchant for quoting literature, dark humour and a touch of theatricality, envisioning himself the hero of the movies he makes in his imagination and ever in pursuit of his enigmatic would-be muse. i can’t help but wonder if paul is me, transplanted by godard into 1960s paris. or perhaps godard has merely painted a flawless portrait of the lifestyles of the young and restless, like truffaut before him immortalised the burgeoning anxiety and angst of transitioning from child to adult. perhaps, after all, there is nothing truly unique about the human experience.

we are all the stars, the producers, the audience of the worlds inside our heads.