The Write Thing

Would it be too irrational to say there are people who fear facts and people who fear feelings? Oh, I know…you would say that feelings are also facts, but that is where I think you go wrong. Feelings are not facts. Feelings change. They evolve, revolve, and sometimes even falter. They grow stronger, weaker…they fade. They confuse, dazzle, hurt, relieve…but all the time they are incapable of stasis.

Instead, facts do not change. They are. Intransitive verb, period. A chasm, a void, uncertainty towering because there is no exit. Facts are cruel and irreversible. Disease is a fact, love is not. Disease is a limitation with an outcome that eventually will be another fact, but love is not. Love is free as a concept, yet a prisoner of its cradle. It grows, and it fades, layers of its skin spread on a spurious surface, a requirement of blind faith for those who choose to indulge.

Yet I am more afraid of facts than emotions. You cannot fight facts, but you can fight emotions, and many people do. Or maybe you can fight facts, but most of the time the victory or defeat will be external to you, and already a given. Yet, many of us mistake emotions with facts and refuse to fight, expecting loss as a token…naive souls…loss is part of every game we play

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate

I am leaving all hope behind me, and here I am…crossing the door.

Yes, I have been lazy in my blogging. Yes, I have sinned. Should I therefore be damned and stoned to death like a cheap Biblical character, or would my readership — if there is still one — be understanding enough to forgive me? I cannot blame them, abandonment is a serious issue…and I know about that.

I have been unfaithful to you, blog reader, having inadvertently channeled my thoughts and inspiration through the conservative land of emails to a loved one.

Yes, she is loved. I am in love, strange as it seems for me, who never saw any of the matters of the heart without a touch of pragmatism, because it is safer, because nothing escapes the mind. And now she feels real, and she does not. Our communication depends on logistics that exceed us, on papers that might or might not be granted, on labs that might give disturbing news. There is so much around us that could change us, so much. And yet, there is this feeling that dominates, a blind tyrannic ruler standing above everything, making us selves and making us whole. Only that feeling makes it worthwhile…the sound of her voice at the other end of the line, crisp after her morning run, or slow and husky at the end of a long workday, the words she writes so timidly and so openly, the fears that neither voices because we just know.

Yes, that is it. Sometimes there is no need to explain love. You just know.