I'm Here. - Saint of Sixth

The love of my life probably died of an overdose during the ongoing opioid crisis.

Or maybe she caught the coronavirus back in 2020 and expired in some hospital bed without me ever knowing.

Maybe we’re stuck in a negative feedback loop with each other throughout time.

I’m born 100 years too early here. She’s born 45 years too late there. And there’s only a brief window out of a thousand or more lifetimes/loops where those chaotic lines our lives make on the timeline crash into each other at one point, instead of creating overlaps in between of various sizes.

But also maybe, more realistically, she never existed.

It’s more than likely she’s a Frankenstein’s monster of what I think love should be — pieced together from examples of my grandparents and overly romantic scenes on movie and TV screens. As Oscar Wilde put it even back in 1889: “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”

I fear all of this time I’ve fallen for the greatest trap in that I’ve been looking at love completely wrong.

Really, and I don’t like this, I’m going to have to blame Plato for at least my initial steps in that direction — specifically, The Symposium.

You see, in The Symposium, Plato describes perhaps one of the earliest origins of the idea of the “other half” theory of love. Which shouldn’t be all that surprising considering it was most likely written between 384 and 379 BCE.

In the text, Aristophanes — one of the group discussing life and love with Socrates — says human beings were “completely round, with back and sides in a circle; they had four hands each, as many legs as hands, and two faces, exactly alike, on a rounded neck.”

“Between the two faces, which were on opposite sides, was one head with four ears,” he continues. “There were two sets of sexual organs, and everything else was the way you’d imagine it from what I’ve told you. They walked upright, as we do now, whatever direction they wanted. And whenever they set out to run fast, they thrust out all their eight limbs, the ones they had then, and spun rapidly, the way gymnasts do cartwheels, by bringing their legs around straight.” (full text here)

However, because we were so powerful, we attempted to rise up and try to overthrow the gods and overtake them. So, after much discussion, Zeus came up with an idea that “would allow human beings to exist and stop their misbehaving: they will give up being wicked when they lose their strength.”

“So I shall now cut each of them in two,” Zeus says in the story. “At one stroke they will lose their strength and also become more profitable to us, owing to the increase in their number. They shall walk upright on two legs. But if I find they still run riot and do not keep the peace, I will cut them in two again, and they’ll have to make their way on one leg, hopping.”

The way your head is placed on your body is also part of the punishment from the gods, according to The Symposium, as Zeus had them turned toward the wound where we were split (facing what we know as forward now) so that we’d never forget what had been done.

And this brings us to the overwhelming desire for reunification that became pop culture’s idea of “the one”:

“This, then, is the source of our desire to love each other,” Aristophanes concludes. “Love is born into every human being: it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.

“Each of us, then, is a ‘matching half’ of a human whole, because each was sliced like a flatfish, two out of one, and each of us is always seeking the half that matches him.”

So, you see, that’s why we do what we do concerning love and relationships — or at least what some of us do.

I bought into that theory most of my life. I firmly held on to that belief that there was someone out there, somewhere, and one day we’d meet and all of the terrible parts of the past would finally be justified because they led there.

Hell, for a moment, I thought that happened to me once.

But as with many matters concerning other people’s hearts, I was wrong.

And you can only get so many dissatisfying results until you start questioning your methodology.

I’ve come to that point with mine.

Currently, I’m stuck between two theories: The love of my life exists, or the love of my life never existed because there isn’t one.

And these polarizing realities exist as simultaneous valid beliefs in my mind for the time being.

And it’s maddening, trying to be more hedonistic while starving to be more domestic.

It’s disheartening trying to give up on the idea of a wife and children while still finding myself giving speeches in my head to a son that I can’t picture the face of anymore.

It’s pure insanity being stuck feeling some sort of love for these people that exist and don’t, these dreams that I’m starting to wake up from as the years go on — like this person I was supposed to meet and never did.

But on the other hand, I could also just as easily be very impatient.

This person could very well still be out there.

Maybe this is that one odd loop out of thousands where we do meet, where we’re born at the right time and where we’re both still alive.

Perhaps it just hasn’t happened yet.

Maybe there’s still some hope left.

If that’s the case, I know that there’s nothing I can do to speed it up. All of my efforts to that effect in this life have taught me that I am simply not powerful enough to do that as the mortal man that I am.

So I guess all I can really do is say this:

I’m here.

I hope this is the loop where we crash into each other.