I used to think that the world was a simple place. Eat the right foods. Treat everyone like you would like to be treated. Love can heal the planet. I spent my whole life struggling to believe the stories my parents told me were true. With every new disaster, I doubled down on my beliefs.
But as age and desperation became my biggest influencers, doubt crept into my mind. Maybe I didn’t eat the right mix of foods at the right time of day. That must be the reason why I am getting slower, rounder, and angrier.
Maybe some people wanted more than to be treated equally. Maybe, because they believed themselves to be better, they were. Maybe people weren’t equal, and G-d favors some more than others. Maybe I should too.
Maybe my love, or what I thought of as love, was not love at all. Maybe I never knew what love was. How could I expect true love from others when I only give false love in return?
I don’t expect love anymore. I think it was only a moral justification for lust. A man and a woman need each other to have a child. They need each other to raise a child. The sexist beliefs of thousands of years engrained in each of us through great love stories and fairy tales enslave us to a life with another person. Without the marital unit intact, the family is not strong to survive the torrents of time.
There are many variables in life, and I have not flipped to the other side. There have been many happy heterosexual couples living the dream. There are many single parents raising beautiful children. There are many homosexual couples raising beautiful children. But there is no grey in fairy tales and we teach our children falsehoods so that they are wracked with guilt if they don’t see themselves fitting into the form.
I once believed in love. I believed that love would save my marriage. It didn’t. I believed that love would bring someone else back to me. It didn’t. When my significant other no longer needed me, they left. No amount of love could keep them. Because love does not really exist.
There is nothing romantic or spiritual about the amount of dopamine running through a person’s veins when they touch another person. It is just chemicals. All our connections with other people, and the need we have to be with our people, come down to this; I want my brain to produce the happy drug. We are all love addicts.
I believe this to be the truth of the matter. But I also believe that the next time I venture out into the grey world, someone can turn my head and if I let that person, I will see colors again, for a day, a month, a year, but not for eternity. Never forever.