theworldissocrammedwithpeople

The world is so crammed with people, why is everybody lonely?” she said. “I dont’t get it. I was thinking that everybody that I’ve ever loved, I still love … and I was thinking that there just below the horizon line in my mind’s eye, just waiting to come up like the sun again, these were people I pined for, longed for, cried over, would have done anything for. I think the great challenge in life is to have an experience and not be bitter about it; Love is painful for everyone, and to get the full high, you’ve got to pay the full price

“And what is the full price?” I said.

“the devastation of its loss”, she
said.

We fall silent.

Then she says, “Allen Ginsberg said, ‘love doesn’t die, it just gets buried under fear and misunderstandings, and an accumulation of missed connections and failures to be brave; It gets buried under all that sludge’.

i believed in the power of my body to subvert“I don’t think that love really dies. I hear people say, oh this relationship didn’t work out, which suggests that the measure of a success of a relationship is if its lasts for your entire life. But I don’t think that’s true. I see a lot of people who stay together out of fear because they can’t bare change. To me, the measure of the success of a relationship is the respect and tenderness that you feel towards someone, long after the relationship is done; for instance with Harold; I just thrashed around against myself; why can’t he do what I want? why can’t he be there, why can’t he make me feel safe, why doesn’t he love me enough to do this or that? It’s funny how we feel that if someone expresses love for us, that that means they owe us all kinds of things, and from then on, once this word love is brought up, the other person is on trial: How well are they going to live up to the requirements of that word?”

Joe Frank, Just Get Me Out of Here