Ptitchitza u niskom letu

Nothing human loves forever

I am a neurotic, there's no doubt about it. Most of us are in one way or another. Nothing less, but nothing more either. To paraphrase my highschool textbook definition of a neurotic vs. psychotic, for a psychotic 2 + 2 = 5. For a neurotic, 2 + 2 = 4 but he is deeply unhappy about it.

The equation of my neurosis these months, or even obsession is that 1 + 1 = as much as we want to make out of it, if another 1 is Maria. Among some of the things she said or did that are roaming in my brain there are two that I also interpret as a proof that she still loves me.

Once (toward the end of our brief relationship) she said that "she wants to make me hate her". On another hand, she would never ever let me take a picture of her. She has shown me some of the pictures she has, some are torn in half, the ones where she was with the lover she went with to Italy when she was 20, an event that because of its consequences she now sees as a turning point in her life having become "ruined".

These two things could be interpreted as her wanting to release herself from my love without feeling guilty, if I "hate her", and at the same time this would make me toughen up in my future. Quite a few people took advantage of my trusting nature, and Rotterdam is a tough place, she was warning me about it. But I'm tough enough.

Not wanting me to have photographs of her perhaps is an expression of her wish to remain in my memory in the version that my memory will filter from negative things. Also, she has seen how self-destructive I was behaving last year and perhaps did not want to be the subject of such outbursts.

But, I can never hate her. I always forgive her, times and times again. I will always love her, but it doesn't mean I will not love again. Just that perhaps I will learn to be more healthily selfish.

She is so beautiful to me, in every way. I even love her neurosis, it just pains me I can not help her in coming to terms with some of them. I love her the way she is.

We are full of contradictions, I guess. Where I make a step above simple neurosis, towards 2 + 2 = 5 is my desire and "obsession" of us being together even if only as friends. She is definitely wiser than I am, at least in the realm of relationships. She does not want to be unhappy about our 1 + 1 = (infinity). I think I know why is that: it's because we provide a certain legitimacy to each other in remaining how we are. I am quite fine and at ease the way I am, but she is not all that at ease the way she is, or the way she was. The two of us would make a world apart together, as she may be afraid of that world.

See how complicated simple arythmetics can get?

I have once referred to our relationship as the relationship of the two "undead" sharing the same hunger, not unlike C. Deneuve and D. Bowie in the film Hunger.

Nothing human loves forever

is a tag line for the film. "I gave up (on life)" Maria would say often and I would always counter it, but last year I have also at time given up on anything but her.

She told me once of couples in love in such tragic circumstances ending their lives by jumping off a cliff together. I am not suicidal, but the idea still has an appeal to me. I'd choose pills or some (other) drugs to do it, but Maria is a physical type, if would need to be beautiful cliff.

It pains me so much that we live in the same city and I never get to see her, that I can't even have a friendship with her. Perhaps some day a good novel or at least a short story will come out of it.