Underground Love

Love is a fickle thing; this has been said many times by men and women much more intelligent and wiser than I could ever hope to be. Sometimes you love a person, sometimes you love a place, sometimes you love a feeling, but… more often than not, I have found myself loving what I believe should exist. I have trouble separating my love of the possibility—of the life I could have—from the cold reality of the life that I am given and building. Love is a hard thing; you give love to the world through actions and words and gentle hands, and sometimes that love is stolen or squandered or tossed carelessly into a gutter or simply never even looked upon. My encouragement is not to cease to love or give kindness and compassion because of the possibility of pain; there will be pain. Love is not something that should be conditional or exchangeable; love is defined by a human’s capacity to give and expect nothing, with the only recompense required being the feeling of giving. That is love. Still, there is a contradiction: do you love the land or the vision of flowers that you could plant?

I ruminate on the Underground Man in times when this lesson becomes incredibly difficult for me to keep in my actions. Notes from Underground is one of Dostoevsky’s novellas; it was published as a series of confessions in a literary journal and later compiled into a single work. The Underground Man is as he is named: a man who lives under the ground of society. He lives under you in a city that you alone have constructed; he lives within all of us, in a way. He sees the world through the lens of haughty self-assurance, where he can sit above those who exist in a higher society through his self-proclaimed superior intelligence and morals. Why is this important? When it comes time for him to reciprocate the vulnerability and compassion required for tending a field, he collapses into himself, unable to see the world through anything but his own social constructs.

I disagree with the Underground Man. Love is not a hierarchy; love is a gift not just for the recipient but for you. When you give it, you show the capacity for care that we all possess; you also show that there exists love to be given to everyone. Don’t lose that.

I personally become enamored with possibilities I see through actions. I see a beautiful flower and look upon it with the innocence of a child, marveling at the way it waltzes in the breeze and twirls with cerulean petals. You can look at the flowers of your life for years and let time pass by in luxuriant waves; one day, you might realize that flower was a thistle or belladonna, whose beauty and grace had been hiding something deep within the wrinkles of its aura. I see these blossoms and think to myself, as I sit with my camera and observe their endless arabesques: even with poison or thorns pointed outward, are they any less beautiful because I imagined they were pure? Do I still love the thistle when I pick it and blood is drawn by its thorn? Do I still love the belladonna even though I can never partake of its sweet flower and must only caress it with my gentle fingers? The answer is yes, but I do not love the plant itself; I love what the plant means. I love the blue crown and the violet lace, but I do not love the pain of its ingestion or the poke of its thorn. I love the plant for what I thought it could be, but not all the aspects that make it what it is. Then do I love the plant at all, or only what it does for me?

I loved a woman once; do you believe it? I still love her, and I have realized that love has multiple parts that must be untangled. I loved her and her joy and how she was a mirror to my own sense of self; I met her and immediately knew I was talking to myself with a pair of tits and a vagina. I loved her and her faults; I loved how she was convinced that she could only be joyful and challenged me to make her angry, because it’s human to have faults and it’s human to feel anger, and I loved seeing her grapple with that because it was real. I loved the possibility of life with her and the world we could have built together; that world came to mean a considerable amount to me. When she took that world in an instant, I was abandoned in my mind. I loved the world I thought we were building, but I did not love the world that was actually being constructed; that was a flimsy creation, and I will never know what weeds had grown through the foundation. Then are the Underground Man and I so different if we both see the world with a psychological construct imposed over it?

Yes and no.

The Underground Man proves to himself that he cannot get to where I have trod; I do love her, and I want the best for her because I care that someone with whom I once imagined a life can have what makes her happy, even if that is not mine to build. I try to keep my own predilections out of my interpretations of others so I’m not seen as a man obsessed with vengeance, but in this case, I hope she grows enough not to tear down her own creations on a whim. I want her to look at what she’s built and examine whether it’s what she truly wants and, instead of saying she’s introspective, simply exist as an introspective person without needing to tell the world. When you settle your identity at a single moment in time, you lose the ability to ask, “Am I actually what I believe I am?”—which is the true introspective question with which we all grapple. That is love in a form where I don’t care about how it affects me or my life or a potential future; that is love where I want to know that she has built a structure she’s proud of and can look down upon the world and find peace without stating the fact. That is loving her good and her bad and the mirror that she is; I don’t know if she thinks of me still or recognizes how much we are reflections of one another, but we are, and I can say that with certainty. Yes, the Underground Man and I are different.

I still love the possibility of life with her, not the life—or lack of relationship—we have actually created. I loved the thought of sitting on a beach with her against me; I loved believing we would go on adventures together; I loved the desire to put her on my shoulders and skate her around an ice rink like I used to do for my cousin. We built that together; she was half of that creation. I know she knows it, and I know it meant something, and I know she thinks of it; I don’t know how I know, but some things in life are unknowable. The point, however, is that I didn’t love what we created; I loved what we could have created. I wasn’t giving my love to the world we had actually built, but to the possibility I had come to believe could be real. We imposed our own beliefs onto something that neither of us was mature enough to properly acknowledge. No, I am not so different from the Underground Man.

Neither of us is so different from the Underground Man; we’re brother and sister in that way. My love for her gives me a need to see her again so I can tell her how she hurt me, how I saw our future, why I loved her, but most importantly, that loving, for me, means wanting to show her it’s okay not to be joyful and that she doesn’t have to hide it. I want her to cry because emotions echo; emotions have reverb, and when you hear them after being deaf for so long, they hurt you all the worse. You cannot hide your entire life, but is it your responsibility to make the world see? No, but it is an act of love to hold someone in their own morning light and not expect them ever to return; it is love to keep them in your arms when they need you, knowing that they might walk away. That’s okay. It hurts, but that is okay.

You are not a broken person for wanting love reciprocated; you don’t always have to be monastic and only give to others. You can have self-respect and require affection in return, but don’t love just the possibility and give yourself entirely to it. Love the actuality existing underneath. I realized that I don’t just love her, but I also don’t just love the world that was torn down in a moment; I love both, but I won’t let myself be a part of that world again unless that imagined reality ceases to be more than a mirage. I want to give her a gift in the form of my confession that she can hold and know she alone is able to see; I want it to be a precious thistle, thorns and all, and not a burden that she must bear. I don’t want the facade I believe she has constructed; fear of being seen is normal, but I want to see and have her know that the light doesn’t sting. You can love the possibility and feel the joy of a world you construct, but you must love what is underneath as well, or that world has nothing to stand upon and will crumble and die. When you love someone, you don’t need to know that they will return; don’t construct anything in their stead. You’ll need their help to plant the fields. That is the lesson of the Underground Man.

My last thought to you: find your land, look out upon the flowers and rushes, and love those first. Only plant the first field when you hear the wind running through the trees.

To love is not to suffer, there can be love otherwise.