"You should meet him. I swear you'll like him," she said while on the verge of crying, mourning a recent love affair lost in the inevitable pit fall of long distance relationship.
"I do not do blind dates," I repeated, for the seventh time. It was a slow ill-starred night, no tense, no rebellion, probably because it was not even seven in the evening. Our company had settled with early drinks recently, always eager to find empty comforts in our beds and the uneasiness of the coming work and school weeks.
"They always end up to be some horrible one night affair for the less adventurous. 95% of the time, I will tell myself that the other person, completely devoid of information about me, relying on sweet talks from you or whoever has set us together for a lame dinner too expensive for a student, is too good for me. I will always think he's too good for me because he probably is. And as for the other guys, I will feel pity because I will never be into them as they are, I presume from their attempt to converse film by immediately mouthing Citizen Kane, into me. Either way, I always end up feeling bad and depressed because it makes me realize I can't get the love I want," I continued.
She's on another bottle of alcohol. The slow tedium of the night was being filled with the sentimental songs playing in the bar. Not the best drug for the malaise of the heart.
"Maybe you should look for the love that you need, not the one you want," she said before taking a long, deep take on her cigarette. "We are not getting any younger, optimistic."
"That't bullshit. You know more than to settle for a yearning so shallow," I rebuked.
She just shrugged her shoulders. Maybe all the heartbreaks, so tender yet inevitable, was consuming her body, her existence. Or maybe it was just the alcohol.
"I'm not becoming some incurable romantic, but you should hear me out. The problem, I think, is that we settle for the love that is convenient, something that does not wake you up longing in the middle of the night, but rather, I don't know, just when you are taking a piss or folding your sheets, you're just 'Oh, this love is enough, I'll take' but you know deep inside it is not the demand that would preoccupy your days and nights with burning friction. If you capsulize love into just receiving, the needing, you are not doing yourself or the other person a favor," said the alcohol, which made me go in a law student rant marathon.
The place was getting crowded, under the pretence of false cheerfulness from the yellow lights and random cut-outs and memorabilia on the cluttered white wall. Our phones ringing from detached pieces of our lives, unaware of our agonies. The night sky outside stingily black from the lack of stars and the dirty pollution.
"We are supposed look for love that would make our hearts leap just by the thought of the other person on the other side of the room, probably just shaving his week-long stubble, which is not even at all, not a tad romantic, not because you need some stranger to leave unwanted hair on your bathroom tile but because that is the intimacy that you have always wanted. You gush over the fact that you are not just close, but ductile. Something, someone that makes you ravenous, so hungry you cannot even remember what it feels like to be void, all those years of being on the edge gone," I made my final case. This is not my spotlight.
"You want or you do not want at all," she muttered under her breathe while she drowsily grabbed her bag and motioned for me to do the same. If only I weren't so tired and full of feathers from the vodka, I would have insisted we drink our bodies to Pompeii. The night time is worst now.
you are absolutely right. a love that sweeps us away, not a brief wind we settle for.
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