Thoughts & Musings: Reminiscing about an old beau

God, we were in love, weren’t we? If it wasn’t love, I wouldn’t know what other label to pin on it. Infatuation doesn’t cover it. But looking back, what the actual fuck? I was 15 when we met and started messing around. You were 18 and going into college. I think you were my first love. I never really settled on a finite definition of the word “love” but when I debate the meaning with myself, you’re usually a solid example of what I’m describing. But you challenged me without feeling like a bully, and that was new to me. You treated my curiosity and excitability as fun quirks and features, rather than the annoying plagues they were to most people in my social sphere. I felt like my temperament - enthusiastic, inquisitive, argumentative, peppy - was not something to be ashamed of with you. You were the first person who seemed to validate my over-excitable nature, rather than try to calm me down. We laughed every minute together, and we always had something to talk about, even if we were talking about nothing. As the kids would say, we vibed.

You were horrible at communication when we met, and at our most recent reconnaissance you still were just pitiful. You were and are sweet, affectionate, fun and funny. You are bright, stimulating, and absolutely pathetic when it comes to saying what’s on your mind - you never could have the tough conversations because the people in your life have always loved and supported you. What a wild concept to me. I digress though, you are so intelligent and also so very inept at speaking to your intentions and feelings.

My own deep seated brother-issues also fed into my perception of you on a pedestal. My brother had always idealized certain parts of life; he set your family up as an example of how a trio of gifted, clever siblings should be raised, and how they should live their lives. Your family members were his gold standard, and being that he was my older brother, he was my gold standard. I took many of his observations about life as fact. I am still un-learning hundreds of lessons I didn’t realize I’d learned from him in childhood. He felt like your family was some pinnacle of perfect family values and execution of effective child-rearing. He had this simple understanding of perfection that was supposedly attainable for people - and honestly, in aspect of life, this isn’t true because perfection is truly unattainable. Out of reach entirely - and that is okay. In fact, that’s great! Release the pressure of needing to be perfect - lower your shoulders, I know they’re tense. There is no perfect rendition of anything in life - no perfect family, perfect siblings, perfect childhood - none of it is possible. But because of this ideal I garnered from my big brother, I thought you were some sort of representation of perfect. And I spent so much time striving to be worthy of you - that shit really messed up my self worth.

I thought you were some sort of perfect, and I thought that your rejection of me was tangible proof that I was imperfect - and that true perfection and bliss were simply out of my reach. I think, unconsciously, I wanted so badly for happiness to be explainable in this black-and-white way.