Robert Manners

I Wish I Were In Love Again

No more care, no despair,

I'm all there, now,

But I'd rather be ga-ga.

I think I've expressed this sentiment before, and I have definitely noticed the repeating pattern in my posts, but the other day I said it out loud... I miss being in love. One would think, given the spectacularly painful failures of all of my love-relationships, that I would be rather disinclined to enter that state again; but though I can always do without the frustrations and despairs I have suffered in the past, I crave the insane bliss of being in love to such an extent that it seems worth the price.



There's a particular satisfaction in having another person in the world who is more important to me than myself. Friends and family simply don't do the trick, nor does work or writing or performance or projects. I miss having a person to think about — not to think about how to get along with or how to best serve or how to get what I want from... but just to think about him, what I like about him, what I dislike about him but think is cute anyway, what's he doing, what's he thinking about, what's he wearing, what's he having for lunch. That thrill when the phone rings and it's him, seeing his face after an absence, studying him while he's working on something, reveling in his presence. It's sappy and stupid, but there it is.



There's nothing like being in love to take you out of yourself. And I guess that's what I want right now, to be taken out of myself.



I must be getting bored with myself. And why not? I'm pretty boring in many ways: I've been at this same job for six and half years, I've been living in the same room for almost ten years (not counting the other years I've spent in this room in childhood and adolescence), my blog has not changed appreciably in two years, and even though I keep getting different cars they are always the same color. My fiction-writing has not progressed one whit, except for the growing appreciation of how bad my fiction-writing has been. I have grown a great deal as a person, but all of the changes have been internal (with the exception of my fluctuating weight and increasingly grizzled hair) and not very interesting to me once accomplished.



Being of service to others is supposed to take you out of yourself, but all I seem to get from my service commitments is tired. Perhaps it's the "commitment" part... for while I certainly do achieve a certain amount of satisfaction from helping people and being of service, it seems that when it becomes formalized and people come to expect my service, it often loses whatever charm it possessed. Instead of being taken out of myself, I am shackled to myself with yet more odious chores.



But perhaps the problem is that I am confusing "getting out of myself" with "escaping myself." Escapism is not bad in and of itself, but it leads us into some ugly places... like alchohol, drug, shopping, and sex addictions. Most addictions come about when we are trying to get out of the boredom of being just ourselves and nothing more... we seek excitement, romance, luxury, and so on, from romance novels or from illicit sex, from a feel-good pair of shoes to a Visa-killing vacation, from a chocolate orgasm to a heroin high, just to forget for a little while that we're just ourselves... for just a moment to stop being plain old boring me.



Perhaps I should try loving myself, instead of wishing to fall in love with someone else. Nevertheless, I keep thinking that it might be easier to love myself if someone else were to fall in love with me... it's always easier to believe what others believe, isn't it?