keninabu!

Love in Flatland

Time has a blotter paper effect on one's memory that becomes more pronounced as one gets older.

It wasn't too long ago when I was completely in love with her (and I still am) and could remember and capture every single detail in our relationship.

Just recently, I felt a bit weirded out, being at a place where I had been before in a previous long distance relationship: the feeling of 2-D love.

Let me explain a bit about what I mean.

When you love someone and are involved in a relationship, you get to see the person in every single aspect. If someone were to ask you about fresh love, you would probably remember the most important salient features of that relationship: the kisses, holding her hand, the first time you made love, her eyes, how you danced with her in the snow, etc.

But those salient features are like musical tones, which are incomplete and hollow without the company of lesser details. When one only loves another for the salient features ("her reliability, character, personality" etc. etc.) and when one only remembers salient points of the relationship, one really doesn't love the Other, so much as love a caricature of the Other's real being. It's flat, boring, like a skeleton sketch instead of an Impressionist's oil painting made vividly alive in one's mind through the collection of a myriad small little things.

Little things comprising of her small mannerisms and actions, such as the race to the door, the way she typed furiously, how she cocks her head when something interests her, how she sticks out her tongue and makes a farting sound, these little things are the things that make her come alive in my mind, and lift her up from 2-D monotony into a vivid 3-D living memory of what our love actually is.

Just remembering this, and writing this, has lifted her up, and made her come back to life again in my mind.

I really miss her.

posted by keninabu @ 4:01 PM