Cowards of Us All

Notes on falling in love, with apologies to Hamlet.

My notes app is filled with half-formed and unshareable writing regarding the person I fell in love with this year. This was not an event I planned or expected; in many respects it was not a thing I even wanted. Have you ever had an experience that threw you into uncertainty when only moments ago you were so, so confident you knew what was up? Like walking into your own house, thinking you know where everything is, but the contents of the drawers have shifted around, the furniture is in different places, the water pressure on the kitchen faucet is harder or softer than it was before, and maybe it’s not that these things are intrinsically wrong in the sense that they need to be put back the way they were, but that you must adapt, because the angle of approach has changed. If I spontaneously grew twelve inches taller, the world would not need to be objectively different for it to look very different to me.

That’s what happened. I’ve been thinking about whether anyone’s ever written a horror movie about falling in love. This will make it sound like I’m suggesting that falling in love is a form of horror – well, yes – but that’s not quite what I mean, what I mean is that falling in love can make you twelve inches taller with a mysteriously rearranged bedroom where everything is intact but nothing is where you thought it was. Falling out of love can do the same thing, although I don’t really remember ever falling out of love, whenever it’s happened. I only remember waking up several stations past “falling out of love” somewhere in “disgust” wondering if I could find my way back, or if I just live here now.

Historically when I’ve fallen in love, I was meaning for that to happen. I was willing it to happen. I am good at love. I can find it when I’m looking for it. I can love many people, each of them singular and precious. Falling in love involuntarily is different. Meeting someone and falling in love with them against your rational judgment is harrowing. It’s unnerving. A decade ago I had recurring body-horror nightmares in which I discovered I was growing horns. Not magical horns, not a sparkly unicorn horn, but something freakish and beastly and shameful. Like my body was striking out on its own, breaking ranks with me, uncontrollable, unstoppable. Like my body would reject my higher self for a lusty satyr driven by instinct alone, absenting hypervigilance, overthinking, all the careful practices that have tried to keep me safe. A pointed reminder that I am not a levitating brain. I am a fleshy creature, knitted together with lurid passions. Love.

In hindsight, I think the dreams were a warning. I have often said that my body sends me warnings my higher self cannot hear; when I have readily acclimated to danger, my body will raise nonverbal alarms that I am not safe. So dreaming of horns, a sign if ever there was one, left me rattled and repulsed and resistant to the message but also haunted and unable to escape it. My dream-self tugged at the horns as though I should be able to pop them off and throw them away. For a long time I thought that in Hamlet’s shuffling off this mortal coil, the coil represented the human body. That’s not right. I’ve since learned that the “coil” is the disturbances and tumults of everyday life. The waves of reality that the body moves through. Shuffling them off, and to sleep, perchance to dream, and what dreams may come? Horns, coiled like the horns of ancient sheep, proving me not to be the tightly contained and disciplined marble statue I always aspired to, cracking the cool stone veneer, dragging me down into something earthly and carnal. I am Hamlet’s flesh, heir to heartache, a thousand natural shocks, whips, scorns, time. 

I fell in love and my composure fell too. 

I don’t know if I could make this sound any less romantic. It is romantic. It is romantic to be so instantly disarmed. It is romantic to be so vulnerable, to be so breakable. It is romantic to trust someone even before you know them. Put your red flag emojis away. We are adults here, and heartbreak does not murder us. Pain is common, normal, even required to remind us of where our boundaries are drawn and where our deepest needs are hidden.

I fell in love involuntarily once before, nine years ago, but that was very different and I fell out of it again – maybe this year, maybe the year before? I woke up in disgust and not knowing how many stations I’d slept through. That time of falling in love felt mean and cloaked. It did not make me feel like a brighter and unblunted version of myself, like this one has. This time has felt like all my cells have turned over at once, and I am the most me of myself I’ve ever been, and I am the most loved of myself I’ve ever been. I will come back to the pleasure and the gratitude in another piece of writing. The horror in this falling is how wonderful it feels. No, yes! I don’t know how to explain it all yet, but I will keep trying.

I will keep trying.