roorkee with love
i’m a lover & a liar. roorkee is a difficult place to be both.
roorkee is a surprisingly easy place to be alone though. most of my friends learned how to be alone here. most of us were forced into it, either overwhelmed, bored or unable to get through to the people in our lives. but somehow it turns out that the first time in your life you get the slightest amount of control & choice over your friends & relationships, the first thing you turn around to do is figure out how to be alone.
for the first bit of your life, love is the solution to loneliness. after that & other bits, love simply accompanies it.
i’m in a v lonely love rn. & honestly, sometimes it just doesn’t make sense to be in love on campus. something a lot of us here talk about at the very beginning of trying to figure out what we want from the person we’re thinking about is “what would it even look like to date them?” we’re already living together. a 5 minute-walk away wherever we are. we already get meals together occasionally. we already study together during exams. what exactly would change? sneaking out to make out once in a while? is that all i mean if i say i want to date you on campus? or is it a promise, maybe? that even if campus didn’t exist i would want this to last?
it’s pretty to watch couples on campus. you’ll see the kind that still get nervous around each other, walking quietly at 2am, hands bumping into each other over and over, unable to talk about anything else because all that’s in their head is holding the other hand. you’ll see the kind that sit in amul at 5pm, one’s head on the table, the other’s hand in his hair, unmoving & silent, like they’ve known each other for so long that all the words sit in their fingers. the kind that talk & race like it’s a game, like children that will never grow tired of the other. the kind that’s only one person & a phone, walking in circles in a park, looking happier on that call than she does around anyone else on campus, a love reckoning with distance & time.
every love isn’t bound but defined by its constraints. because, like i said, the loneliness is inevitable. at best, you’ve got the promise. that if the constraints didn’t exist, you wouldn’t be lonely. we wouldn’t have to be children or dumb to talk & we wouldn’t run out of things to say & we wouldn’t have any thought that we would have to leave to our mind alone.
i’m aromantic, polyamorous, & pansexual, for context. a lot of big words to basically mean that i don’t feel love (romantic or otherwise) unless i have absolute & detailed control over how i get to define it. this usually means i struggle to tell people i love them until i can tell them exactly what i mean by that, & what the consequence of that love would be.
most of the time i need to be able to know the love before i feel it? so mostly when i say i love you i mean i love whatever i have w you rn & i might not exactly want anything more at all. but sometimes, i want one more thing- like when we’re looking at each other long enough, i really want to lean in & kiss you. but idk if that’s love. i can’t know until i try it & get to know the feeling of kissing you. but i also don’t know if you know a world where people kiss before being in love. a world where people kiss, fuck, talk, & even, love, only to figure out if they do actually love you. in any way that they could call it love. so i don’t know how to ask you.
a lot of life & love is about learning how to talk- making my lonely thoughts make sense to you. it’s so lonely being a thinking animal. it’s bound to be. in Other Minds, Peter Godfrey Smith talks about how we develop our internal language of conscious thought through the evolutionary adaptation of simply listening to yourself to keep track of whether you’re saying the right thing. you start sending “efference copies” to your brain until, these efference copies start talking to themselves basically. so even as its genesis is in the extremely not-lonely purpose of wanting to make sense to other people. somewhere, you learn to be alone, to make sense to yourself. and then, the task of beginning to figure that sense out & send it over to a friend in a way that their brain could think it and make sense of it too.
( love is reading Other Minds w someone :" )
most days, i’m surprised we can understand each other at all. all the complicated symbols, sounds, layers, & meanings of words that we all somehow map through the infinite possibilities of to somehow reach something like an understanding, an agreement.
julie delphy calls it god, i can stick w simply calling it love. she also goes on to say the most painful thing though. that this, this understanding, is impossible. that we never actually do. i can’t know what you mean by something you say because i’d need to know everything about you, every bit of history, that has contributed to the way you see the world and the meanings of the words you are using to know what you mean. our thoughts are inevitably lonely in our heads. & they’re lies outside.
but she also says “who cares really? the answer must be in the attempt.”
just yesterday, i asked a boy i loved & love very dearly to watch Before Sunrise lol. everyone should, tbh. i love all of you.
but if the answer is in the attempt, then loneliness is inevitable but love doesn’t just accompany it. love, possibly, is the solution to it. it’s just the promise of the attempt- if i could have done anything about it, you wouldn’t have been lonely.
so then, when i tell you i love you, all i mean is that i promise i’ll try to understand.
will you?
life & roorkee are full of people. i want to hold your hand all the time. & i don’t want to be scared to talk or understand or ask. if i’m promising to attempt to go beyond our constraints, i must really go all the way. we’re growing older, & our pre-frontal cortexes are freezing, only for so long before they start rotting, & in this fraction of a lifetime, i want to love you.