There is no such thing as perfect..

.. and no such love as unconditional

The Absinthe Drinker, Edgar Degas

First in the line of business, a very happy new year.

Dear reader, I haven’t been here for so long, and yet you are here, reading my words and listening to me after what feels like ages. Thank you for being here, my friend. I don’t refer to anyone with plural terms because this is an excerpt from Me to You: you, you, the singular you whose eyes follow these words. This is a chit I passed to you in class, a letter I address just to you.

Dear reader, whether this new year brings to you all the new (or old) things you want in your life is something we are not sure about. What we are sure about is this - it’s just another day today, and today, yet again, our minds are filled with thoughts no one taught us how to have, and some hearts are probably filled with pain that no one taught us how to ever heal.

Today, tonight in fact, I was made to feel, unknowingly, very much degraded and unworthy by the very people who love me (we shall not go into too much detail about the who or what. Let’s focus on us for now.). It’s no one’s fault - there is a certain situation, just like every situation, where one party feels to much (me) and the other, not so much (people I love). It’s not their fault, and neither is it mine.

See, dear reader, everyone knows how to deal with the good emotions, the joy, the lust, the love, the duty. No one knows what to do with you when you are sad, angry, distraught. You break down crying one night, and so many, so many things are crashing down on you. Your love asks you what’s wrong. You try, in your broken words and emotions, to tell them what’s wrong. They have never been in your shoes, or they know that your pain is in part, their fault. They say they don’t understand. It is not their fault, it is not yours.

Dear reader, maybe you and I are in the same boat. Maybe we spill love over everywhere we go, holding on to the never ending hope that one day, that one person will understand. They will just know what I am feeling, and they will help me heal. I am in a well, and they will pull me out and help me escape.

Unfortunately, it is not happening. There is no such thing as a perfect sync of hearts and minds, no matter what the books or the Chicken Soup stories or the Reddit threads of wholesome acts are telling you. Even, even if you communicate or talk it out, there will always be some things you will have to face alone, always.

Love, in turn, is not unconditional. It is not just receiving - support, ears to listen to you, shoulders to cry on - it is also giving - patience, acceptance and support, ears to listen to someone, and shoulders to help someone cry on. Perfect love might as well be unconditional, but no thing is perfect, and no love is unconditional.

Sometimes I certainly wish the heart’s burdens could be truly shared with people. Here is my anger, will you please take some of it? Do with it what you will please. Here is my sadness, will you bury it into the ground with me? I wish, I wish and I wish. Oh, dear reader, it is now time for me to wish less and just do more, and bear whatever my heart feels.

However, there is one thing I know - at the end of the night when the clock’s nearing 2 am and everyone’s asleep, you’re still there for you. You’ll sit with your heavy heart like a mother with her sullen child on the dining table because no one came to the child’s birthday party. And it is unconditionally your job to make the child feel better, no neighbor or friend is coming to help.

When no one shows up, you do, you being the soul to this heart and the mother of this child. You take stock, you bake your sullen child of a heart a cake and make them realize that a birthday is a birthday and pain will always be pain and we will just hold hands, say our grace, and try to live with our birthdays and our bad days and bad nights and everything that no one understands. Like the Absinthe Drinker, we will live with ourselves and live with our hurt and ugliness and beauty. We will live with ourselves, our togetherness perfectly unconditional.

Dear reader, it is now time to put your hand on your heart, like a mother pats a child’s head with care, and move forward. Remember: love is not perfectly unconditional, but we can be.

Live and live,

Apollo