By Sarah Elaine Muir

You spoke to me in a dream. You said we were supposed to be together as the brilliant light beamed from the ominous concrete tunnel in the distance. You spoke to me of its brilliance, its significance as well. You it was a symbol.

Our eyes met and the symbolic tunnel in the background began to glow. The earth began to shake. Does this dream mean anything? I am obsessing over you from afar. My idealism is steering yet, the logical side of my mind is the backseat driver, yelling at every stupid blunder or naive thought I feel.

Hope clouds observation, they say. He’s just some guy. It’s not a big deal. I don’t care. This is my mantra. I repeatedly recite this phrase in hope that the words will stick semantically. I do not know you. I am merely projecting thoughts of who I perceive or want you to be. Who are you? Are you alien? Enigmatic Plutonian energy beckons my impenetrable curiosity. Our promising synastry chart also feeds these obsessive thoughts.

Yet, I feel like it won’t work out. I am losing faith in relationships. All my dreams are fading away. What then, may I ask you is left? Sure, you are cute, have seemingly great interests, you are able to compose yourself in a calm, kind, serene demeanor. I am definitely attracted to you, at least on the physical level. I want to be in a relationship, yet I fear it. Can it ever happen to me? Will I ever find someone who complements my personality? It honestly seems entirely hopeless. My inspiration is running dry, akin to a waterhole drying up in desolation of the Sahara desert. I know less what I want than ever before, what is it exactly that I want?

Romance, love, relationships, are such a big part of our society but I cannot even get myself to take part in that culture. Watching a romantic film is so difficult for me. The first part of this difficulty is that most of them are sickeningly cliché and cheesy. The primary problem I have with watching romance films is that I am unable to relate in anyway. I have no idea what it feels like to have someone’s arms around me telling me that they love me and want to be with me. I don’t know what it’s like to kiss someone that I believe I truly love. I don’t feel emotionally attached to a significant other because I have not found one. I feel lonely. Like the cries of the faceless monster in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, “I’m lonely! I’m lonely… I want Sen!” In this instance I will translate Sen to something. Something to believe in, something to attach to but not to the point of possessiveness, just to unite with another and create something else. An entirely different entity from myself. A relationship has a life and dynamism of its own, separate from the individual self.

But these films, these fantasies that rarely occur in on a day-to-day basis, they are lies. They are false! Is it even real then? Do people fall in love? Does it even exist?

Love’s formula = lust + idealism

Is it even worth it? I look at every relationship around me. Each one more fucked up than the next.

Every relationship seems so unbalanced and unequal. Perhaps this is too much to ask, but I really want to be with my equal of the opposite sex. I want us to feel equally passionate about each other, although this may be too ideal. My virginal sentiments will remain caged for quite some time then.

* * *

I wrote this previous passage about six months before I met my first love right before my twentieth birthday. When we met, we bonded over our shared appreciation of T.S Eliot.

* * *

Modern love is cold and distant, in many ways unrequited even if bound in a web of sexual intricacies…

“I was hoping that the end of our relationship would be more dramatic. I was hoping that you would have to leave for Paris… I mean a phone call? C’mon! That’s boring.”

“Well I’m not trying to live up to your expectations. I’m not your entertainment.”

I am human.

“My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad.”

My current state of mind is obsessively analytical.

It is disheartening when authors of lyrical phrases, phrases that hold so much meaning for you, are in reality insensitive chauvinist pigs.

After first reading these phrases, you read them over and over because the words resonated in some deeper part of your psyche and you needed to latch on to them; you could not let them go. They are now dancing with you, connecting with you, orgies of phrases slithering and intertwining in your mind.

You soon come to find that the author’s purpose of producing this literary work was quite contrary to the way in which you hold these words so dear:

That is not what I meant at all. That is not it at all.

“Stay with me. Speak to me. Why do you never speak?”

Our post-coital conversation consisted of silence. He brought his phone out and began to read the news. I lied there and sat in contemplative silence. Why is he so silent? Why did he even invite me over? Could it be possible that he loves me as much as he says he does? Well this is a poor way of manifesting it or lack thereof.

He told me moments later that he doesn’t need to have sex with me to show me that he loves me.

I am not sure why he is telling me this because it is not like I asked for this or begged him to give it to me. Sure, I enabled him and yes, I did want it but I wasn’t going to voice that desire. I guess he was telling me this because we are broken up and he is sleeping with someone that he refuses to tell me the name of.

He came up to me, hugged me. We hugged each other and then began to hold each other. Stroking every conceivable area of the body. Our lips did not even touch until after possibly ten minutes of this silent embrace. The extent of our gestures was stroking, holding and smelling. I wanted to breathe in everything, his scent reminded me of good. It reminded me of feeling adored, feeling beautiful. Something I am not sure I had ever felt prior to meeting him.

He makes me want to believe in myself more, for he has this strong sense of self-assuredness that is admirable and even somewhat delusional. I wish I had the same level of confidence regarding my actions and myself. Half of the time, I find him embarrassing, irritating, a complete self-interested dork. The other half, I smile endearingly at all his irrational reactions and romantic hopefulness.

“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?”

I stare at him intently almost every time we’re in a room together. Perhaps it has always been a bad sign that part of his intrigue is that I know not of what goes on in his head, and I am constantly trying to solve the unfounded jigsaw puzzle that resides in his brain. I stare and stare, in an attempt to one day break through the epidermis and his dense skull and figure out what parts of his brain are most active.

Every sentence is so vague.

“Have I ever given you anything?”

“What, you mean like an STD?”

“No, like… I know what you have given me. Have I ever given you anything? In our relationship.”

“Sarah, I have enjoyed my time that I spent with you. You are a wonderful woman…”

Subsequently, he spoke to me of other vague phrases of how he liked seeing me and sleeping with me. I cannot even remember what they were because they were so vague. And I became cross at the fact that he couldn’t be more specific, he couldn’t have told me exactly what I have given him, if I even had given him anything. I could write endless essays and stories about this curious societal enigma.

One time he asked me if I had ever written any poems about him.

I replied no.

“Oh.”

“But I have written sketches about you for my creative writing class”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah. But you can never see them… Have you written anything about me?”

“No. I’m sorry. I didn’t think you were going to say yes to having written anything about me.”

Several weeks later, while he attempts to coax me after he made out with his ex right in front of all of my friends at a party and offended me with his disrespectful behavior,

“Sarah, I have written poems about you.”

I later bring up the first conversation in regards to creative expression produced by about one another. He denies that he didn’t write poems about me. He said he just didn’t want to tell me about them before.

“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”

He invited me over to his place. He told me he did not want to sleep alone tonight.

It felt awful: guilt-ridden unfinished intercourse.

* * *

My last romantic involvement gave me insight into how modern love appears to function. One dominates; does what they want. The other merely observes and supports. However the dominating one pays the other’s kindness and compassion with physical love. When the other demands their emotional needs to be met, the dominant one verbally acquiesces, but nevertheless does not act upon their hollow words. The inequality observed previously still exists. The other would do anything for the dominant one. I wonder if such a relationship exists that partakes in undying physical passion, a genuine desire for reciprocity, and a true sense of equality in their love for one another. Perhaps I may only find these types of relationships within artwork; my dreams.