I don't necessarily want to be free. I just wand to be happy. Happiness for me equals love. I am very naive when it comes to love, and I don't mind that. It irritates my friends and amuses me.
I have a strong crush around twice or thrice a year. The latest crush I've had has crushed me like a French crêpe. I'm not sure whether it gets stronger with age or whether I have the chance to always meet a better person every time. It never lasts long because it is rarely reciprocated, but for a month or two, it anaesthetises me.
After some reflection, I came to call myself “plastic heart”, for plastic is always recyclable as far as I know. Moreover plastic is absolutely everywhere. It is not very healthy, yet extremely useful.
Now I'm not writing this to be nagging about my failure to find a real lover (I hate this expression), or to exhibit my heart's flexible character. I just felt the urge to express an idea that's been working its way into my mind and then out of it for the last few years. (You may fasten your safely belts as the descent into Clichéland is sometimes very brutal): does love free or imprison us? Ever since I've started thinking about it, my answer was the second. Love imprisons us, or at least, reduces our freedom. We become attached to one person and cannot plan anything independently from them without putting the love affair at peril or causing ourselves to suffer from separation or any other possible outcome of the love of autonomy. Many sacrifices are to be made in order for the love affair to survive, and those sacrifices are very often freedom itself.
An interesting idea, however, and one which occurred to me only this morning, is that a love not only frees us from the love just before it, but also frees us from all the potential loves we were most likely to fall in, if not for this very love. In other words, when we love somebody, we not only forget all the pain that may have been caused by another love story that in most cases has ended lamely. But (when we love somebody), we become insensitive to other people's charm and beauty. At least it is the case for me. Thus, when we are not in love, we are potential lovers for all people on earth above the age of 12 (for legal issues, I'll be talking about “spiritual love” and not sex). When we are in love with one person, however, we become insensitive– thus free from all the rest and tied to that person only.
If you look closely, you'll understand that one can never be free, because whether in love, or out of it, we are always attached to something or somebody, at least I am. It is nice, however, to try and conceive of our attachment to a given person as better than no attachment at all, in the sense that no attachment at all is a continual threat of attachment, and thus an even greater one.
NB: Don't take anything you've just read too seriously. My strongest motivation was boredom, and something else: I don't know where to begin with an exposé about Chaos Theory that I have to prepare for Thursday, so I'm delaying the task with whatever I may lay my hands (or my mind) on. I'm ready to write a dissertation even about flies, or the spider bites I've had in Dakar last week, which gives me an idea...)
When you're not in love you're like a spider, or like a fly trapped in a spider net. Every string in the net is a potential attachment, and you're a prisoner to everybody. You're a prisoner even to the other beings who pass by the net. And even when you've not been trapped yet, you're a potential prisoner to all. But then, when the spider comes to claim in you whatever spiders claim in their flies, you become the spider's prisoner ONLY, and thus, the spider's “love”, although it very often kills you, frees you from all your other ties.
Love like a spider.
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