LOVE

Tonight I watched Divergent.

I wasn't planning on it. I got home from work and my roommates were at a neighboring apartment and so I went to join them. And they were watching it. So I just stayed.

I was so grossed out by all the violence. Killing, especially when done via knife or gun, is really hard for me to handle in movies. It makes me feel really deeply and it almost makes me get more sensitive. I'm not sure I quite understand it. It makes me not know what to do.

In the movie there is a love story. Between the two Divergents. And it's cute and perfect and wonderful. But after the movie I had all this bitterness towards all boys. I realized it as I was talking to Allegra. And as we talked about it I realized, and she taught me, a lot of things. I used to love love stories like that. I would get all giddy over them and day dream about them. But now I get frustrated and have all these angry feelings about them. And I think tonight I may have understood why.

I learned a few years ago that romance and relationships and love were not what I thought they were. I learned that intellectually first, and then I felt it. But I only felt what it was not. I felt like the thing I had dreamed about and wished and hoped for didn't actually exist. It wasn't real. It was something made up in the movies and in the books. It didn't actually ever happen like that in real life. I understood that. I internalized it. And I tried to be okay with it.

Every once in a while i felt like I got a glimpse of what true love actually is. What it is in reality. And in those brief moments it made me happy. Not like the happy, giddy, dreamy feeling I got after watching Mr. Knightly and Emma, not the hope for something fake. Rather it was a deep happiness. And I got a glimpse of what that deep happiness would look like when I found that real love.

On my mission I learned a lot about love. I learned what it meant to love a companion even when sometimes you were so frustrated with her you could hardly be civil. That was when real love came in to play. When you kept loving them and put their needs ahead of your own.

But coming home I think I fell back into this jaded perspective of love. Things just didn't work out the way I wanted and I've been starting to let myself believe that it would just never feel the way I wanted it to. I want to stop that. Because I know it's not true. Allegra said something that made me really think. She said, "I think romantic love is very very close to love you feel for a friend."

I actually don't know how I feel about this right now. So i'm going to stop writing it. But those are my thoughts thus far.