On Cynicism and Love

I have spent my life intellectualizing every feeling in my body. My anger, my misery: I could always pin it to the wall and explain to myself how stupid I was being to feel this way, really, when I thought about it.

Every feeling but love.

I could try, if I were inclined to. I know a few facts about what makes people attractive, or how quickly people decide whether or not they’re compatible with someone. Even how many relationships fail, on a long enough time scale.

But I guess — Life is hard. It’s a fucking misery half the time, and I’ve become a cynical wretch in the last few years as is. The kind of person who can’t even look around themselves for 5 seconds without finding something awful to hate about the world.

And for all that kills me about it, love still feels like the one thing I still don’t have the heart to grow cynical over. Even in rejection or pining. It hurts. It hurts like hell. But, that hurt comes from a place of recognizing something amazing in someone else. Something so amazing that for a glimmering moment you forget about the end of the world; with its carbon emissions and fascists.

Instead, you enter into a pink haze, where it’s all suddenly gone softer around the edges for you. And everything that’s ever made you want to disappear seems manageable.

God forbid if the person feels the same about you. That pink haze becomes a lightning bolt. Nothing feels like it’s sitting still. Like you can feel the Earth flinging itself through space at thousands of miles per hour, and you’re just barely hanging on, while your heart rockets around inside your chest.

But even in the hurt and longing, I don’t want to be a cynic. Because if I really care for someone, and really value them for who they are, how could I?

I could become the reductionist and pull every feeling down to chemicals bubbling around in the dark of my skull, but what an injustice to them. What an injustice to the person I love.

I don’t care about the oxytocin, or serotonin, or dopamine. I don’t care about maximizing my chances by overriding my autistic mind and making eye contact. I don’t care what genetically predisposed me to loving someone.

I just do.

In this one place, that is enough for me.

I just love them.

We’re random matter suspended in space, trapped on a rock with moderately intelligent apes, who’s main contribution to the world is that they’ve grown just powerful enough to really fuck up the place.

And if there’s anyone, anyone at all, who can, even for an instant, make that life an honest to god joy to live, then let them. Just let them make you happier, you cynical bastard.

Life is too short to dissect this joy I feel when I see them smile or make them laugh. When I look into their eyes and they into mine, and I don’t feel the need to turn away. Because they somehow make it okay. They make it safe. And that’s all the reason I need to fall, over and over again.

And so I do.

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