Love's supposed to leave you changed.

I'm reading a collection of Elena Ferrante essays someone gifted me recently and so felt inspired to finally watch the fourth and final season of L'Amica Geniale. And right from the get go, I snagged my ears on a quote,

"In love, it's over only when you can become yourself again without fear, or disgust."

And I wanted to be moved by it and say yeah and nod, except I kept thinking... how does anyone go back to being themselves? And what exactly is this self you can so easily go back to, as if nothing had happened at all?

And I wondered whether I was being absurd, whether the answer was really in the quote. It's over when you can go back, which means if you don't recognize a self you can safely go back to, then it must mean... it's not over?

Except I don't think so, no. Maybe it's the writer brain in me (or more aptly, the heart), but I've always thought the stories that mean something don't leave you the same, that you can't possibly go back to exactly the thing you'd been before. That the things that matter leave you altered forever. I prefer lovers whom I can carry with me forever, a little sliver of them mirrored in my soul.

I have no room in my life for surface-level wanderings and passing instabilities. Which is not to say or seek love or loyalty eternal. But I've made a habit of carving out nooks and crannies inside myself for the people who meant something. So that it feels, sometimes, when the wind is against me, like walking barefoot down a long strip of beach, gathering seashells to my satchel. Heavy satchel, tired feet, and I should leave some of them, that'd be the ergonomic choice.

But then, how would I know the miles I've walked?

I collect people to me like seashells, to help me remember when I'm old or beginning to feel myself too alienated from this world. And perhaps I could tie myself to people of more value. Or sometimes, to kinder, lighter people. Or people who wouldn't leave, or that I didn't have to leave behind, or just.

Different people. But wouldn't they weigh about the same, more or less, inside my fishnet satchel? And wouldn't my shoulders be about as heavy, carting them all after me? No one is inherently worth keeping. Only to you, and only to me. We keep what we need to keep, what made a dent.

When you can return to yourself without fear...

Am I afraid to be who I was before? Maybe. Afraid because then, my self would be misaligned with this time in my life. I can't go on as someone who never met or knew you in a world where I have. So fear comes natural. There's an imminent sense of disaster about, a world ready to implode because of this misalignment. And my dreams get strange, and the world gets anxious.

...or disgust.

Who feels disgust at their self? Well, a number of people, but logically, you feel disgust when you're being untrue to yourself. When you're betraying yourself, and isn't it a betrayal of sorts?

---

What's the point of this and is there one at all? I suppose I've been thinking about my collection of people loved. In all shapes and sizes and sexes and ages and meanings and creeds and faces and arrhythmias. Been thinking I get hung up easily. That things matter too much, and I haven't yet figured out a way to make them mean less. That I wish I could explain to the people who know me how heavily everything weighs, how seemingly meaningless, tiny things come mountain-sized if you give them sun and water them regularly.

I've a whole culture of pots and clear glass jars in which I'm growing odds and ends, and little bits of lives I could've lived and didn't. And every once in a while, I'll tiptoe in and nip and trim at the edges, make a writer's arsenal out of my oddities.

It gives me a reason. It gives it all a purpose. But really, I think, if I wasn't a writer, I'd just be a someone who feels everything a little too intensely. Who collects things and then doesn't know when to let them go.

I'd be someone who didn't know how to make sense of herself. And I don't. But here and there, I write snippets that seem to make sense, little paper-boats that serve as pacifiers. Little. Like my jars and my glasses and my boots in this terra-size puddle.