Love

"When you're little, love is when you get your mărțișor charms

(Tina has the fluffiest, biggest mărțișor collection in the building)

and love is when your fortune-telling notebook asks "what color are his eyes?" and

"would you rather be friends or get married?"

and in the end he looks the other way and befriends or marries someone else

and then smokes a cigarette, and that's when

love is suffering-like-a-fool,

when you feel sorry,

when a slow song starts at a party and you well up with tears

and his palms sweat,

he wants to know everything about you.

but most of all love is when it's summer

and your heel snaps off in the scorching asphalt

— it's a sign that someone's thinking of you.

casting spells, wanting you back.

on the sidewalk in front of the building

dozens of heels glint in the afternoon light,

broken but dignified.

like Jean-Michel Jarre's lasers at the Shanghai concert,

drawing the line between us and the rest of the city.

and the greatest love is

when George from the third floor folds paper airplanes

— letters for you

and when the coffee is hot

and "The Young and the Restless" has just ended,

that's love too.

and it still pinches at your heart

and screams: I miss you!

love honks its horn in front of the building

when you dye your hair red at the salon

it gets impatient, stomps its foot.

but there's even more love when, from the building across the street,

a voyeur touches you with a patch of sunlight (like something out of a dream)

reflected off a mirror, while you put on makeup in front of another mirror.

and between building B and building A4

that voyeur checkmates you with his patch of light

stretched boldly across the street.

love is also when you break up

and he doesn't "give you the boot"

only that "you deserve better," he kisses your forehead,

and then you don't let him wipe away your tears too

and summer comes and school ends,

the cleaning ladies come and wash the blackboard

mop the floors, scrub the desks

and nowhere does it say "I love you" anymore, and love

fits entirely into the soapy water,

then fits entirely into a rag

dirty and frayed at the edges, and then

it's left to spend the summer in a red bucket

that the cleaning lady forgets every year

in a corner of the teachers' lounge."

The Girl in the Elevator, 2003

So what is love, in the end?

Is it all of the things listed above?

Is it what you're living today?

Or what you wish for?

We end up defining love mostly through what we see in movies, read in books, see around us. We rarely stop to ask what our own definition actually is.

The less pleasant part is that we end up living by other people's definitions, which are often the opposite of what we truly want deep down.

Hardly anyone stops to think about things like this anymore.

What matters is finding someone who accepts you, and that's that. You get married, get a house, have a kid, buy a car, and so on.

And then? What comes next?

Then you wake up somewhere around middle age — although, looking around, it usually takes no more than five years before divorces, breakups, affairs, and the like start showing up.

Everyone manages as best they can, doing what they see or have seen others do, until that day comes when they're worn down by all the running, the failed relationships, the problems, and the poor health.

On that day, you have two options:

1. Either you close yourself off and see everything around you as bleak, never letting anyone in again — you become critical, pessimistic, and gloomy, burying yourself in work and other things that let you forget the existential void and the ache in your soul.
2. Or, you decide it's time to do something, to change something about yourself, to ask for professional help, and to start untangling the story you've been building all along without your own conscious presence.

I believe many people end up bitter and superficial because they've first lost trust in themselves. And then in the people around them.

Everything is rushed, chasing instant rewards. We say we no longer have time to think about matters of the soul, about self-development, about working on ourselves. Yet what I see is that those same people spend a lot of time reading gossip, scandals, and other things that do them no good at all. If anything, it only deepens the void.

Then they wonder what they're doing wrong, since surely they haven't hurt anyone.

No one, that is, except yourself.

In closing, I'll leave you with a question:

If you keep going at exactly this pace, doing everything you did this past year, where will you be in 5 years? What about in 10?

Are you the person you'd want your child to become?

Talk soon,

Raluca