I was probably close to seventeen when the first tinglings of what Disney sponsored child’s logic told me was love. It was hardly a salacious romance for the ages, enlightening the naïve minds of hand maidens and accentuating the imaginations of boys who sat up at night to read by the light of an ill lit torch but still scoffed at their friends willing to admit the same. No, it was hardly one of those tales. Looking back on it now, he was hardly one of my more “refined” tastes, but was all the underfunded, overlooked metropolitan school of my adolescence could produce. Perhaps there were a few qualities I liked about him. Perhaps I just enjoyed knowing that I could make a person mine with nothing more than the flick of my hair. I’ll never really know. Besides all the rhetoric at the time spoke to love being a form of ownership anyway. The point of love wasn’t in finding a God amongst men, but to settle for the devil and bring out all his juicy, affectionate qualities. Us girls were all about the bad boys.

           I suppose love always had some sense of propriety to it. Apparently before Da Beers decided to become enormously profitable and convinced the world that a giant blood diamond capping a finger that would slowly burst over the years from potato chips and whatever else could fit in the deep-fryer was somehow romantic, men used to propose to cars or some other item extravagance and prestige. I could have probably done better with a car. Anything would have been superior to the beat-up Prius I was driving when I met Doug. I guess sometime after 2017 saving the planet stopped looking sexy and just became another cliché for dementia patients to discuss perpetually until their memory improved or they ended the conversation more abruptly. In many ways environmentalism wasn’t the worst casualty of war. I still have my Prius, rusted and brutalized as it may be. A fossil still leaves evidence. That’s more than I can say for the other ‘isms: communism, veganism, feminism, liberalism, globalism and any other word that mattered in high school and then everyone collectively erased once they entered the “real world”. They still exist, mind you, just no one cares. It all comes down to the tree falling in a forest lesson (yes, I had that philosophy professor too). They’re the elephant in the room, although that implies that still have some relevance. Perhaps a better characterization would be the fly on the wall. It never bothered anyone and no one ever bothered it. If it didn’t lay maggots in your attic every once in a while, you wouldn’t even know they existed.

           But, I think I may have gotten slightly off track. I was writing about love and the stirring age of seventeen. To some extent there was always that image of the setting sun across the tranquil waves while two lovers wrapped themselves in each other’s smoothing arms enveloped around the tightest passages of my brain. I’d be willing to guess that nearly every girl growing up in my generation had the same picturesque scene imprinted unto their mindscape with only tiny, in all likelihood, insignificant variations between their views of who played the role of Mr. Perfect. My mother probably envisioned Tom Salleck or maybe Captain Kirk, at any rate far from the balding, scruffily moustached and pot-bellied man who would become to be my father. Thinking back, I would say I envisioned a beaming, Spaniard poet who would inscribe love sonnets dedicated to me in all manner of romantic languages unto the ephemeral late-summer beaches with his finely crafted rapier.

        It should be no surprise then that my first boyfriend was a greasy-haired, foul-smelling, party-throwing degenerate whom no one could fully decide whether he was destined to make a million dollars or spend a million years in jail. It turned out to be closer to the latter. He certainly was smarter than his friends, although this stemmed from him smoking less of the weed he sold them, not from his particular successes in the gene pool. He fit every romance novel I’d been feeding my infantile brain for my entire life. He was dangerous, lewd, rebellious and passionate, although it was difficult to say what about. He revelled in the fact that everyone else had a plan for life except him. He embraced his stagnation. He rejoiced in the filth. He knew every inch of his body and soul and learned to appreciate their stench. In a way, I came to love it too, like how a law student learns to stomach the putrid sting of scotch before surrendering his life to it as a lawyer. If you’re taught to adore something enough, you can find a way to love it with all your heart. What option does one have but to do as they’re told?

        That’s really why I broke up with him, because I was told to. Not by cheap, straight-to-rental cheesy romances that comprised nearly the whole of my parents’ VHS treasure trove, but by the owners of that mountainous stash. I rebelled like any teenaged girl would but when my parents threatened to cut me off, I decided to cave in. I think my parents meant they were going to disown me entirely. I just heard that I wasn’t going to be able to shop with the family credit card. It wasn’t really a hard decision after that.

        It wasn’t until five years into university that I met Doug, a similarly impoverished student with a similarly useless degree. After we were evicted from our the first apartment we had ever owned together, we ended up sleeping in my derelict vehicle for nearly two weeks before another round of student loans came in. I suppose those were just the fruits of taking a doctorate in psychology when all the problems of the mind were being treated by manufactured drugs, not research. Doug didn’t really help in that regard. No matter how enlightening a life-long study into African literature might seem, it didn’t yield anything spectacularly material. His Swahili chants just didn’t have the same ring as the Spanish poems my Latin lover would recite each night as the gentle coals died down and the sun delicately touched the anxious waters below in my dreams either.

        I thought that love was making sacrifices, expressing feelings, mating souls and fiery passions. Instead it was waking up, groggy and incapacitated at four in the morning to hear the man you loved a whole continent away tell you “good night” through a fuzzy connection. It was eating macaroni microwaved in the boxes we bought them in because we couldn’t afford dishware. It was rolling over in bed every night unsatisfied and wondering about that Mr. Perfect still roaming the beaches and then mentally slapping yourself for ever having such evil thoughts. It was seeing the only person in the entire world you could be completely honest with slowly become heavy and dysfunctional from your very presence. For me, it was looking into the door-less medicine cabinet and noticing a new prescription that had never been there before.

        It was watching a mind slowly die in front of my eyes. That was love.

        I tried to save him like a nineteenth century fireman tries to extinguish forty foot flames with a two gallon pail, frantically, audaciously and futilely. I began to realize the meaning of all those romance novels that worshipped the “bad boys” and the broken-hearted recluses and the tender-hearted vampires. The purpose of love wasn’t an ultimate freedom experienced by two, but a chain to be worn by the stronger ankle. How can you leave a wife dying of a cancer, a son borrowed by debt, a mother crying of pain or a husband rotting from life itself? I suffered as he did not because I wanted to, but because there was no other choice. I kept holding on to the thought that one day there would be a light on the horizon, that if only we writhed through this storm that idealized beach would be on the other, not-too-distant shore. I just didn’t know the ship had already sunk.

        So, you might be thinking, did all those girls who grew up reading fairy tales and watching princess movies to become bored housewives obsessing over soap operas and Fifty Shades of Gray, turn out any happier? Did the love-coddled, uptown girls that lived in worlds made of cotton candy and risqué magazines have it any better than I did? No. The truth of the matter was, it didn’t matter what you believed, what god you prayed to, what books you read, what shows you watched, what parents you had, what money you made or what person you loved. Life just has its way of disappointing you. You could always make more money. You could always lose a little weight. You could always get a bigger house. You could always get a prettier wife or a handsomer husband.

        That’s why every religion ever invented taught us to release ourselves from this realm of greed and suffering. That’s why terrorists are willing to blow themselves up to prove a point. That’s why protesters start themselves on fire to get attention. You think they believe in something higher, something greater than themselves, but you’re wrong. They just understand the truth, the ultimate truth.    

        No matter what straw one draws in this life, it’s never the one we want.