Thoughts on: A hopeless romance, a missing cupboard & the nostalgic nature of humanity
I know that my time here is coming to an end. I'm ready to go. Yet I'm not that ready. I guess you could see it coming: My next sentence and how it will begin: There's this guy... And this is how all the good and the bad stories start. The live changing stories, or the bed time stories, the stories that last a life time or just a week. The love stories.
All my bags are packed, I'm ready to go. I'm standing here outside your door. I hate to wake you up to say Goodbye - John Denver
So there's this guy. I'm not going to talk about how we met, how he looks like or whatever. I'm just going to talk about how he is. And how he makes me feel.
Whenever I feel lonely, he reminds me that I'm not. He cares. I lie next to him - without having sex and without kissing, just staring at him, for hours, staring back at me and it feels good. I don't wonder much about what this is or how we got this. I just want to go on like this forever. I don't want to change it, to develop (even though I know it's neccessary), to break up or to really commit to it. Because I don't want to destroy it. For him, I'm the first one.
On the one hand. this feels awkward, because I am afraid he will regret it and because he's not the first one for me.
On the other hand, it's so unbelievably beautiful, it's special. He does not try to manipulate me, he has no high expectations, no broken hearts and no crying nights due to failed relationships on his back. He still believes in love. He's innocent. I like that so much. Maybe because I'd love to be like this again. I would like to go back to my 16th year, before I had my first boyfriend, when love was that ONE BIG THING: that dream, that miracle to find.
I don't know why this makes me cry now.
When I was younger, I was very afraid of change. For example, I cried so badly when we got a new cupboard in our living room. (#firstworldproblems, I know, but) How was I supposed to live with a new one yet the old one had been so good and reliable and felt like home to me?
How was I supposed to stand a life where everything I loved was changed constantly, taken away from me or replaced by something worse? How was I supposed to be happy when I knew everyone was going to die eventually at a time in the future, because everyone grows older? And how was I supposed to sustain growing older, being an adult, leaving childhood behind and my parents dying before me?
I hated these nights when I lay awake for hours with the carousel of painful thoughts and questions going on and on in my tiny head. In the end, I cried myself to sleep, over and over. Not every night of course, but some nights - especially when I hadn't kept my mind occupied by other not-so-important things that regarded my daily life.
Some nights I wish that my lips could build a castle Some nights I wish they'd just fall off - FUN.
My biggest fear was change. Change that would make my body look different and make me feel ugly (commonly known as puberty, kids). Change that would come with the time, inevitably and fast, and give my parents grey hair and wrinkles and would make them die -sooner or later. Change that would end every good time I ever had. And what follows after a good time? For sure, a bad time. There weren't going to be good times following good times forever. I was convinced that change would destroy everything. Change would make everything worse.
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| Now my home, soon a memory, because everything changes. |
Is there still a bit of this fear inside of me? With the years going by, with accepting myself how I've become when I developed, matured and changed, I changed my regard on change. I learned to be more accepting. I accepted change as a part of life. Change is the only abstract thing that is unchangeable. It comes with the time, that goes by and that is unstoppable, no matter what you try. The time as a physical factor noone really understands. Isn't change as a result of passing time the essence of life? Everything is in motion, everything dies and something new is born and even if the material doesn't vanish (like e.g. water) it changes constantly, to ice, raindrops, water from a source, in a stream, in a toilet, frozen in a glacier or on my cheek when I cried my eyes out because of a cupboard that was tossed in the trash 12 years ago.
Get back, get back
Get back to where you once belonged - The Beatles
You see, I've accepted change, It doesn't frighten me anymore. Or does it? Or does it just make me look back on my "unchanged" or "innocent" self, the past-Lotta, with all her morals and beliefs and opinions? I don't know if she would have liked me now, the Now-Lotta (that will be the new past-Lotta in a few seconds), I often like to imagine she would tell me I've become a bitch. I've changed too much. I've gone to far. But where do we go from here?
I can't get back.
If I think closely about it, I don't want to get back. It's just this kind of nostalgia you like to plunge yourself in when you meet someone like him. But you recognize, maybe everything is lovely now but it isn't going to work out, because he's going to England for a year starting in September, and you are beginning your studies in Germany, "environ" (=roughly speaking) 861 kilometres away from him.
Adding to this, you have the solid base of barely one month together in which you weren't really in a relationship at any point. How lovely is that?
On top of all, you see, you're just not on the same level. Yes, you like his sweetness, his innocence, the romantic stuff- but is that really you, how you are now? Not really.
This is what little 14-year-old-Lotta longed for on the sofa, with her braces watching High School Musical for a billionst time. But is that really you, "grown-up", responsable, 19-year-old-Lotta, an adult, an to-be university student, who does her own laundry, independant, studies for a politics exam, likes contemporary art, has had ONS and still feminist ideas? Maybe you could be together.
You could be truly in love, you and him, if you would both stay here and had the time. But you know what? You don't have the time. That's life.
You, dear reader, get me. You see that I like the idea of "past-me" and "now-me" and "future-me" as if they were seperated from each another. In fact they are all me, inevitably connected, myself in all varies and shapes and sizes. It's fascinating, isn't it?
How change, how all the factors of change (time, journeys, people, environment, ideas, experiences, a book, an article, music, a single sentence, a look...) can make you a different person, with every thought, every love story, every year on your back you get richer and better and in the same time more complicated and hurt.
I unsuccessfully tried to find I good metaphor for this. The best I can offer is, to see your personality as a book, or better, a story. A story that is rewritten, changed, edited, expanded, completed, cut off, ripped out and glued together again in a randomly beautiful mess.
There's no such thing as a "simple character". Constantly changing who I am, I like to document moments, I like to keep records of my change, take snapshots of the versions my story can show. In my poorly written songs and poetry, my blog (YES, THIS IS A SNAPSHOT RIGHT NOW) and right on top my diaries. Because humans love to be nostalgic.
You can have a good time judging yourself at the age of 3 in pampers giggling and playing in the sand in a bleached out photograph, remembering "The Good Old Times" with your buds enjoying a beer in a bar, laughing at your heartbreak in 7th grade when you were convinced you'd never go out ever again when you read your old journals...
Every human loves to look back on his life, pictures and pieces of texts and memories and says things like: "Isn't it funny how hideous I looked in my braces?" and "Oh it was sooo ugly that old cupboard in our living room!" and to smile about that lovely little love story that was never meant to be written.
