knowing this time I'd run from him, he spread pitch on the stairs

Do you ever walk down the street in the sunlight, window-shopping and in no hurry to be anywhere or do anything, when all of the sudden, this well of feeling bursts inside you and you're just so damn glad to be who you are? That was me this morning, after having a hot tea and strawberry-pistachio cupcake for breakfast and purchasing my CD at FNAC well before I had to be anywhere. It's about 50 degrees outside, with the sun shining—perfect weather for walking. I'm going to go have a coke and a bit to eat at a café across the street from the train station once I check out of the hotel. Then I'm homeward bound! I've managed to fit everything into my backpack and purse, so no extra bags to carry although the two I have are now plenty heavy.

It's a great start to the day.

I know the feeling won't last. It's amazing how a day or two can change our entire outlook on life. One day I might want to curl up in my bed and never leave it again, giving up on the world and on living and on dealing with people day in and day out. Sometimes I'd give anything to be someone else. And then there are days like today, when nothing could persuade me to give up what I have and have had. How fickle the human heart. That's why I don't think love has anything to do with the heart. I think we like people with our hearts, and it feels like the love we read about or see on TV so we think that must be it. So we date, and we marry, and we think we're in love with our whole hearts when really, those hearts are fooling us. Just like one day we hate the world and the next we can't think of anything better, our feelings are unreliable and ephemeral. Transient. Love, real love, isn't like that. It isn't defined by blinding passion or warm fuzzies in our chest and butterflies in our bellies. Those are fleeting. Love is a type of knowledge. Feelings accompany it, but they aren't always present or powerful. Love is knowing—all the time—that someone matters to you. Love is wanting to see them, maybe not every day, or every week, but wanting them not to disappear from your life. Love is finding, seeing, hearing, experiencing something—anything—and wanting to share it with that person, whether it's a father, a mother, a brother, a sister, or a lover.

I've always hated that passage in the Bible—you know the one, everyone does—where it describes love: Love is patient, love is kind, etc. Love is none of those things, and all of them. Those are feelings, qualities, like pain and jealousy and impatience and wrath, that can accompany love or result from love. We are kind, we are patient, just as we are cruel or violent or unforgiving. We are those things; we feel them in our hearts. Love is beyond the heart. Love is the soul. We are not love, but love makes us who we are. That undefinable, inexplicable something I feel when I go into an old cathedral and light a candle, maybe that's love. A love of history, a love of the world, a love of people, a love of myself and my family. Maybe that's God, although I don't think that's what people mean when they say "God is love." I have a different concept of God, but that's neither here nor there. What matters is that love, like God, is objectified. It's something more, but we put it in a box and give it characteristics so that we can classify it, name it, and thus understand it. That emotion we call love, it isn't. We need a new name for it, because the connotations involved with calling it 'like' aren't accurate. Maybe it can keep the name love, and true love we should call God. What we know as God need not have a name.

"We make an idol of our fear and name it God." -Ingmar Bergman, the Seventh Seal

I wrote that quote in my notebook while watching the movie, because it struck me as an important thought. How it relates to the above sentiments, I'll leave to your interpretation. I have mine, but mine only matters to me. As, I think, it should be.

But my point, I suppose, is that we throw around the term love when it shouldn't be, and in doing so, devalue both the word and the sentiment. Modern pop culture is heavily to blame for my current train of thought. The concept (various TV shows presently come to mind) that you can love someone more or less than someone else strikes me as wrong. Love is love. It simply is or isn't there. You can't say "I love you, but not as much as I love so-and-so." or "Not like I love so and so." You can care for someone more than someone else, you can be more or less attracted to someone, feel more or less affection for someone, but love isn't a quantity. Can you love more than one person? Of course. We all do. We love our family, some friends, some partners, even some exes. But there are different kinds of love, people say. Familial, romantic, platonic. At their base, though, they're the same. Love between partners is simply love with attraction, affection, passion, and all the rest attached. Love between family and friends is love with affection and caring. Does that mean we don't have soul mates, true love, people we're meant to be with? I have no clue. I'd like to think so, that there is someone we're meant to love beyond even my explanation of love. More binding than love. Having never felt it, though, I can't tell what would make the difference between someone you love, and someone you are meant to be with, a soulmate (for lack of a better term). It shall be interesting to find out. I'd like to think I will, but we'll see.

How philosophical I get on a pretty day. This is the sort of rambling you get to read when I think too much and have the time to actually write it down. Things like this or completely opposite of this pass through my head all hours of the day and night, but I'm not usually so industrious as to put it into words. Long train or plane rides, for instance, or a quiet morning in a café give me that extra incentive. But thoughts too are part of the adventure. Epiphanies are just as vital to a novel or plot as the action. While most of my thoughts aren't epiphanies, they are wanderings through the overgrown marshes of my mind that may one day stumble upon those epiphanies buried beneath centuries of roots, leaves, and muck.

Yes, I said centuries. There's no way all that stuff up there in my head accumulated in only twenty-two years. It took lifetimes to accrue, and it will undoubtedly take lifetimes to sort. If that's even possible.

Continuing on from a tangent in my last post: things about romance novels that annoy me and I wish to avoid in my own writing. Characters who refer to themselves as tortured, filled with darkness, separate from anyone and everyone because of their experiences. First off, it's arrogant. To assume that you, of all the people who have ever lived, have experienced anything beyond what others have, is absurd. Secondly, who calls themselves tortured, jaded, and "dark"? It's like the villains of the piece calling themselves evil. True evil, and true villainy, doesn't proclaim it to the world. More often than not, villains come about because they believe they are doing the right thing, whether for themselves or for the world. Good intentions, roads to hell and all that. "Tortured soul," "hero," "villain," those are names. Names are things other people give you. To declare it yourself is to defeat the purpose. Like those hand bags or t-shirts with writing "I'm cool," "I'm hot," "You know you want this," and especially "Don't hate me cause I'm beautiful, hate me because your boyfriend thinks I am." If you have to announce it to the world, it's probably not true (or you're insecure enough you feel like announcing it will somehow confirm it). If you're cool, or hot, or beautiful, that would be self-evident, yes? And anyway, like names, those are terms other people give you. To give them to yourself is arrogant and insecure (no, those two are not mutually exclusive—they often go hand in hand). If you have to tell your parents your name as if they don't already know it, then it probably isn't your name. (And here I'm referring to the average person in the world was born to parents who then named them. Let's not play the 'what if' game, because it's avoiding the point.) Let's let other people do the naming, and just be ourselves. Let's avoid naming ourselves tortured because we might not have a true understanding of the word. Everything is, after all, relative.

To authors or writers, I say, let's tell less and show more. Cliché, I know, but if you have to tell your readers that the hero is tortured, it diminishes both the writing and the character. Show, instead, and I promise all that brooding torture will come across no matter how dim-witted your readers. Same goes for villainy. Show through their actions, not pronounce them evil and force people to take your word for it. Especially because you can label someone tortured or evil, only for their characters not to merit it. Then you look a bit silly, and I, personally, feel inclined to pass by your other work.

While I'm discussing literary pet-peeves, I feel it necessary to mention another particularly loathsome tendency. I hate reading a hero think about how he doesn't want his darkness to infect the light of whoever his lady-love is. That drives me crazy. If she's human, she's got darkness too, and you're completely self-centered if you assume you've more darkness than she. "There are big things that happen and there are small. And the part that's so unfair is that we call them big and small. Because when something happens to you, and you lose something or someone you really care about, that's all there is. The world may be blowing up around you, but you don't care about that. You don't care about that at all." A quote from Stephen Spielberg's miniseries Taken that I was forced to watch in English my freshman year of high school. While watching it, I kept a notebook of quotes from it that I really liked. This is one of several that has stuck with me through the years and I find exceedingly wise.

In case you haven't guessed by now, I'm passing the time before my train in a café across the street, drinking a coke and feeling the sun on my back keeping me warm. Then I had time to ponder while standing on the quai waiting for the train to arrive, and as soon as I took my seat, I whipped out my iPad to add my continued thoughts on these subjects.

Boy, can I ramble.

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