A Letter From a Work in Progress

It is no wonder why most songs, movies, and books are about love. You can be bitter about love when you are out of it, but when you are in it everyone knows there is nothing better. Sitting there in the dark with Kate I knew I loved her. I knew because I was happy. I think I was too young the last time I was happy to remember what it was like, but the feeling is now crisp and bright.

We spend most of our time hiding our weaknesses. We act brave when we’re afraid, we pick fights with people who scare us, we pretend the future isn’t there, we say we are “okay.” We perceive all this resistance we put up as strength. Then we take a wrong step somewhere and fall in love, and all the resistance is no longer needed. It’s scary because we feel weak; rather we realize we are weak. All this resistance we thought we were putting up was nothing more than hiding and we find that we haven’t grown strong at all.

Then the most dreaded word, after love, comes: Vulnerability. Before, we pretended that we were impenetrable. Nothing got in or out, but now we lower the bridge that we never told anyone existed, now there is a big gaping hole in the side of your stronghold, and we find out that we want nothing more than to tell every filthy secret about ourselves and every fear we have, in the name of love.

The third word comes: Happiness. Not so much dreaded as it is thought to be mystical—and uninteresting. Just like love, we tell ourselves we don’t want it because in the act of wanting we suggest we need something, and therein lies a weakness. So we say it doesn’t exist. We wanted to be interesting like Elliot Smith or Fitzgerald, so we drink too much and do too many drugs, and push loved ones out of our lives; anything to make ourselves feel more miserable each day. After we feel it, though, we know that being happy is much more interesting than being sad, and we realize we know more miserable people, and read more miserable authors, and listen to more miserable musicians, and less of the happy ones, not because the happy ones are so uninteresting, but because they are so rare.

And I know that in reading this letter you don’t find it as interesting or good as my other letters (as I still kinda feel that way myself), but I think that’s just because we have trained ourselves to look at these things with our head half cocked to the side, and with one hand in front of the face so as not to get a full effect, afraid of what it might do to us, and we miss what’s there.

So, like every other poor sap that has fallen in love, I have tried to explain it, and I think I did as good a job as anyone could do.