Only if they Love the You that is most Important to You

It gets harder with every year, sophomore, junior, then senior. One of the few aspects of college life that is more difficult to witness yet more beautiful with every year. The freshmen pour in. Eclectic fashion, astounding energy, the hope of millions channeled inside each individual one, the kind of vigor that shines like the rising sun in mid-July, stunning expectation, anxious physicality, anticipation long forgotten and the kind of fear that you only recognize at the beginning of each Fall semester. It’s that fear that reminds you of how dull your light now is in comparison to back when you were them.  The kind of fear that is just waiting to be opened up and operated on, changed, re-arranged, unlearned, created and re-created. The kind of fear you miss knowing as your own intimate confidant. You allow envy to linger and make your best effort at rekindling memories from your distant observations. You delight in a vulnerability that seems to be jumping up and down, dancing and banging on the doors of downtown Richmond, on the edge of its seat waiting for the call of the beginning of the rest of their lives. To know the unknown and to finally be known for what it is. College! The place they escaped to under the presumption that this was the place to bring yourself, be yourself, become yourself. The place where they will acquire ambitions, beliefs, experiences, friends and knowledge that will surreptitiously give the finger to everything at home they came to escape. The immersion of varying opinions and things known to them as taboo will come to create a rebellious persona that can only be enacted through the bonded result of this pledge made with their fellow freshman to be new and curious. They travel in packs and can be identified as coy, brave in a quest to prove memorable, obnoxious, or important. They are innocent seekers.  

Many come with significant others. You look on with concern and a thriving joy inside yourself than no amount of cynicism could thieve from you. Together they possess a rare fragility displaying that passionate, all consuming, out of their minds, first time, I would eat my peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich off the bottom of his/her shoe 3 days walked on and savor it, run to the ends of the earth to make my point to finally give in just to feel all of it at one time, forgo all plans, hopes, dreams in the name of Jimmy/Susie kind of enamored devotion. They were dropped off by mom and dad and overnight became the people they are becoming. Naturally they conclude to make it eternal. Within this pact they promise to be together forever. They sit on the quad/Monroe Park on a towel and share Pizza Hut and Shafer soft serve.

You leave for your 9 a.m. wearing smeared makeup reeking of jaded annoyance that sums up all thoughts of your disappointment in Honey Boo Boo’s repugnant idea of spaghetti and your high electricity bill. You walk past the dorms; 8:50 a.m. He sits outside of Brandt and waits for her with big gleaming eyes begging for approval with Starbucks in hand and endearment in his heart. You would bet a million bucks that this kid would sit there for another 30 minutes waiting, that he would pick up the three morsels of the muffin she drops in class and dust them off if she asked him to. You want to tell them to suck it dry. You just want to walk right up to these two people that you technically know nothing about and say, hey guys, please, give it all you got because even when it does come down you just have to be able to say you gave it all you had. To be able to say that you wanted the last sip of milkshake and you let them have it at the prayer of a dirty, unexpected make out session mid-way through statistics in the window of her 15 minutes between classes up against that restaurant window filled with twenty on-lookers in the Fan with reckless abandonment.

You concede to yourself that they fight as if the fire of 6,000 suns is upon them and they’ve been told that the last mouth releasing a word is the one that won’t burn to death. Slowly but surely you observe their internal struggle for freedom come to challenge what they once knew as the most unbreakable alliance mankind had ever seen. You watch expectantly as they give the most dramatic, wholehearted portrayal of a country trying to overrule their struggle, oppression, and progression with the Constitution of their original pact. They remain products of the America today that knows nothing of a Constitution, little of who they are at age 17 and even less about commitment. Months later, they disappear. You know they still come to class but they aren’t together and he certainly isn’t waiting in the morning outside of Brandt. It is as if their presence ceases to take up space. Occasionally you glance around to find them, respectably singular beings. They are always dressed quite differently than you remember, a different demeanor, maybe hair color, way about who they now are.

Love like that is something that makes an appearance with the spectacular likelihood of a perfectly spaced, free parking spot in downtown Richmond or guessing the exact weight of your Sweet Frog cup. It transcends into other’s lives and tells the world that reveries are not to be martyred but lived. It shows us all that in placing your being within another you deceive your worth and knowingly ingrain in your destiny a counterfeit map. Love like that impels others to believe in the union of two people when they don’t believe in themselves. It knows no free man and vacuums up the aimlessly roaming dreamers to make captive. It is cruel and kind, wishful and selfish, silly and original in a world where the word in its intended form has become extinct. We know it to be fleeting and relentless with the fury of a breaching stage 4 hurricane. Love like this gives birth to a hate stronger than we have or will ever know. You can only hate as much as you have ever loved. This piece of life's pie is injected with an expiration date proceeding with purpose and a poison that’ll keep you down and out for much longer than a few days. Whilst wading in the loathing of the one you once called yours, evolution’s light creeps into your window sill. The light gives growth to the hate so thoroughly harvested sprouting maturity. The mind becomes entwined with the rest of humanity’s. We begin a lifelong courtship with those around us. Our imaginations are bigger and broader, but not with creativity, but realizations of pain so many carry. Empathy overwhelms us.

One can find love without ever having known this specific flavor of it. Most don’t but all things are possible. We give ourselves over into another’s identity hoping theirs be strong enough to allot meaning to ours. One of two ways it ends. Either so weak both break or one so strong that it overcomes the other through consumption in pursuit of addiction to the power. In this lesson, we learn that real love is not a tug of war between wills but a generous offering, equal efforts volunteered toward succumbing, subduing, or extending your will to meet your counterpart.

What if I said that romance is finding that person that loves the you that you love the most. Well I would sort of be channeling the sentiments of Carrie Bradshaw at the end of the Paris episode. That one is my fave. But think about it, really. There’s something about the thought of that… something fresh, something predestined to it, something that makes your arm hair stand up. It takes your mind down that back road you grew up riding in your best friend’s PT Loser (Cruiser) for forever and forever. It broadens your perception of the world around you and pulls out a beckoning, earnest, happiness from your very core, or maybe stark madness. I love the word madness. No matter where you are, who you’re with, what you’re doing, you often think, no one sees this one thing that’s inside me just waiting to be woken up. Why?

What if someone did and they fell in love with that…. That would be everything, change everything. We spend our whole lives walking down this path. It’s all our own. Many of us end up taking side, alternative, sporadically chosen routes. We culminate experience and good faith to truck on. The gps of our subconscious is screaming and warning us in that British accent (no, that’s just mine) and from time to time we feel a little tug from it. We become quiet enough internally to hear the buzzing for a moment. It jolts us, get those endorphins going and we get off a little bit on the thrill of taking the alternative route for the adventure. We do this in order to explore, pick up and drop off the varied remnants of ourselves that we never knew pieced together our identity. Eventually we come to our own peace, our consensus. We hit a pinnacle; a death, abandonment, lost friendship, breakup, a fork in the road and we make a decisive decision. The acceptance of the I am “insert random culmination of unique traits” and I will not waver. I will seek and open my mind to newfound knowledge, traits, and changes but this is the base of who I was built to be.

Are you the silliest, quirkiest, most optimistic person you know? Are you one of the most loving, or generous, or unique people you know? Is doing little anonymous acts of kindness your thing? Does no one give a compliment quite like you? If one of your friends wanted to dare someone to jump up on the cafeteria table and announce in front of 200 students that it was them who pulled the fire alarm twice that morning, Would you be the one most likely to do it? Are you ridiculously convicted in your belief that the world would be a way better place if we all cuddled with a fluffy Persian or stray behind the back of KFC every single day? Do you ask the best questions ever? Are you secretly brilliant but everyone takes you for Kim Kardashian? Are you a hidden comedian that no one will accept in response to your immaculate GPA and endless leadership titles?

You’ll know it when you see it. When you find those special details about yourself that you hold most beloved, demand that it be loved with shameless, brazen courage and exuberance. It sounds simple enough in theory. Why even talk about it? I all too often see young couples today try to subdue or control some part of their significant other. Don’t be subdued, but renewed to whoever you are. The right person will love about you what most people don’t appreciate or perceive in the shallow confines of society. That doesn’t mean that tomorrow I should wake up and decide that I am the biggest genius man will ever know and I must win all arguments. These characteristics must define love and be easily lendable to the harmony of a union. Who you are isn’t a choice but a state. Before you can find your person, I think, you have to know yourself. Once you know yourself you have to prioritize your character. The person that falls effortlessly in love with it just as much as everything else that comes with you….. that’s your person.