No Evidence of Intelligence

I smiled at the memory, as if it were an old friend I’d somehow forgotten I missed dearly. Two years ago I buried my past, but every now and then I find myself coming back to tend the grave. But I don’t leave flowers, just pours of scotch where there should be tears. It’s hard to reach for tomorrow when yesterday is buzzing right there on your sofa, right at your fingertips, in a yesterday and I-Still-Think-About-You text. But every friendship has an end, right smack in the middle of it.

Go after her. Fuck, don’t sit there and wait for her to call, go after her because that’s what you should do if you love someone, don’t wait for them to give you a sign cause it might never come, don’t let people happen to you, don’t let me happen to you, or her, she’s not a fucking television show or tornado. There are people I might have loved had they gotten on the airplane or run down the street after me or called me up drunk at four in the morning because they need to tell me right now and because they cannot regret this and I always thought I’d be the only one doing crazy things for people who would never give enough of a fuck to do it back or to act like idiots or be entirely vulnerable and honest and making someone fall in love with you is easy and flying 3000 miles on four days notice because you can’t just sit there and do nothing and breathe into telephones is not everyone’s idea of love but it is the way I can recognize it because that is what I do. Go scream it and be with her in meaningful ways because that is beautiful and that is generous and that is what loving someone is, that is raw and that is unguarded, and that is all that is worth anything, really.

Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.

The vast majority of women don’t want or demand big expensive gifts and baubles from men. You want to be surprised, which is to say you want physical proof that we were thinking about you when you were out of sight.

All these promises that we make and break, why is it that you think people get married? Because we need a witness to our lives. There’s a billion people on the planet, I mean what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you’re promising to care about everything, the good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things, all of it, all the time, every day. You’re saying, Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go unwitnessed because I will be your witness.

Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are.

Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.

~Louis De Bernieres~