fictional and far away

Sometimes I recall that bit in Love Actually where Thomas Sangster and Liam Neeson decide they're ready to get the shit kicked out of them by love. Sometimes I think that I’m ready. But I am either not brave enough or haven't decided anyone's worthwhile yet.

I feel slightly existential about this frankly, in a mauvaise foi kinda way. True of all our emotions, we just convince ourselves of what we are experiencing. As our good existential buddy Hamlet said, “there is no good or bad, only thinking makes it so”. For example, I’m not really sure if I love my family, but because they are my family and that’s what I am meant to feel for them, I tell myself that I do. It is just as easy to be jealous of someone and to dislike them as it is to admire and like them.

Anyway I wrote the following in a very obvious attempt to distance myself from the topic.

Love was sitting high up in the trees as I walked home, the sun shining through leaves encouraging my sentimentality, knocking leaves down to me as I strolled. The street was otherwise empty and I could smell jasmine quite strongly walking past the grand houses in my neighbourhood. Love rolled its eyes at me enjoying the spring, probably willing me to be more pragmatic or something. Love nudged the birds and the trees in the ribs and made them all laugh at me for my hopeless romanticism. Love knows I spend too much time walking down pretty-looking-jasmine-smelling streets to get a job or travel or find a husband or save a life or change the world or do all those things that seem truly possible when the sun shines haphazardly through leaves. Love laughs at me with Nature, and Nature quite openly hates me and my disregard for it. They gang up on me in my daily life, make me trip on my baggy pyjama pants, make it rain just after I put my washing out on the line and make the cats scratch me.

I have actually never been in love, which I think is evident, and I don't want to write about it any further I'm afraid.