I witnessed your wedding. It was ridiculous in nature. The sun was setting, painting the sky in shades of orange and pink. Gratitude? Love and acceptance was felt in this dream. He stood alone in the garden, watching as his ex-lover prepared to marry. He felt nostalgia—but not bitter or longing; it was simply nostalgia.
Memories of their past played on an old TV screen, with weeds, brush, and the forest pulling the screen of memories into its core. The sounds of crickets, cicadas, and inhabitants of the evening garden consumed the environment. In one moment the sounds felt like the music of nature, but in the next, they became the chaos of existence. He fixated on the screen. With his gaze locked into the stream of hazy memories, a flash engulfed the screen, and there sat a dead plant in the place of the TV screen.
He felt a ringing noise consume him as he peered at the dead plant. He couldn’t look away—it was drawing him in, its shape resembling a tree, and with the characteristics of a bonsai. His curiosity was being pulled by the tree’s air of mystery…
He forced himself to tear his gaze away from the tree and towards the wedding ceremony. His eyes locked with those of his ex-lover standing next to her new partner (a shadowy figure), holding tightly onto the mysterious tree. The dead tree.
A chill crawled up and down his spine. He repeated the phrases love and acceptance. Gratitude? The two pairs of eyes met and brought him a feeling of understanding.
Let the silence of what is dead speak.
Do we ever consider our desire for something—in this case that desire is the feeling of love (both being loved and knowing what it is to give it), and then we spend the rest of our lives never fully grasping a full understanding of that very feeling? Most people view love as many-tentacled while being an enigmatic entreaty only ever partially understood.
Even when you believe yourself to know it, you never fully understand it.
We spend our lives wanting—without entirely knowing—what it looks like, or even being certain of the perception of it. Where does our understanding of the concept of love originate? Well, we'd have to examine the entire concept and history of the desire to begin scratching the surface of that question.
And in many respects, being placed in a situation where you're experiencing romantic love...one could describe the feeling as being on the brink of insanity.
Do you wonder about the confusing feeling of love? Think about it for a moment... a single spark that creates a chain reaction of captivated feelings, emotions, and desire; a mixture of shapes and symbols weaved together into an intricate, yet comically unpredictable ride into the various crevices of your psyche.
Communication becomes an act of making and unmaking the self. Such is the beauty of it, wherein we take part in a craft with others as we unmake our own selves—then finding that we are always incomplete, and awaiting endless possibilities of new becomings.
We know that relationships inevitably involve communication, be it effective in form or not. The reality of our communication with another becomes a process of making and unmaking the self, which provides an unavoidable confrontation with inner uncertainty through our inter-subjective communication with another`.
We become uncertain of ourselves, our feelings, and how the other’s (we're communicating with) understanding is regulating the communication of the former. Thus, we might be able to assume that the unmaking and remaking of the self is intensified through the communication experienced with romantic love.
I'm of the belief that, as a child, we're being inundated with information, symbolism, regulated values, and structures to inform the formulation of our emotional state, sense of self, and identity. And the trajectory of this means as an adult, we have taken this mapping of our various understandings of this process, whether conscious, subconscious, or unconscious—and created an emotional base of operations for ourselves.
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