bury me in a time capsule
keep me there or dug me up later
We are but characters in a story, pieces in a puzzle, information within a bigger context.
Gabriela’s piece "The spark” isn’t what you think it is on her newsletter Sex and Sensibility has awakened me to a new realisation, one that I have actually only arrived at a few days after reading it. In this article, the writer delves into the fact that “the spark” between two people is really just a product of the context they are inserted in and explores how different contexts fuel love in different ways. This piece held very true to me in various aspects, myself being the “romantic type” that often feels “special connections” with people that I can’t really explain, but there was a passage that particularly stuck me,
Redefining “the spark” also helps immensely in the face of unrequited romance. Someone’s feelings not matching my own should not denote my worth. But when you like someone, and they don’t like you in quite the same way, it’s hard to remember that. If you add context into the equation, it’s a soothing thought. It’s not right person, wrong timing. You’re actually just a different person to them than you are to yourself. Without the correct context, they can’t see you clearly. That’s not a reason to stay – you can’t change their lack of vision. But it’s also not a reason to spiral about your self-worth.
The notion that unrequited love can be explained by a difference in context, rather than a reflection of one’s faults or “mismatch” with the other, has brought me a new sense of peace. You see, for a while now I’ve been dealing with this funny type of heartbreak, unrequited love. It’s a different and surprising form of grief. Most times, I don’t feel anything at all - I go through my days with a free and open heart, I look for specks of love on strangers faces, I delight myself in being single, getting to go about my days in my own terms, without the responsibility of holding another’s heart, of carrying another’s feelings, of responding to their texts. But then I read a book where the characters remind me of the people we were together and I find myself crying because we never got to the good part of the story. We never had a build-up and a fall-down and a resolve.
Our story, if I can call it that, is forever frozen in the first few stages of falling: when we’d color in drawings together, the final result an uncohesive patchwork of my pastel tones and their vivid hues, the mismatched eyes on that cat she colored to match each of our own; when we’d walk home together, and I would end up staying over for dinner, sitting in those soft white sheets, trying not to make a mess of myself; when we’d sit always just a tad too close to each other, our knees brushing eachother and staying put, held together by gravity and a secret other thing I did not know how to name. Because I didn’t dare name what I felt for her. And when I finally found the words to describe it, it was suddenly too late. Our context had changed.
All this time I’ve lingered in the answer for all the “Why don’t you just tell them?” my friends would throw my way. I felt as though my responses were nothing but excuses, that I was unable to get across whatever it was that I held in my heart. This made me confused - if I couldn’t give a good enough excuse then it meant that I had no reason *not* to tell her, but something about that felt wrong too.
Now, I do make sense of it. The love that I had for her existed in the context we both inserted ourselves in. Seeing eachother every day, coloring together to drown out the boredom of those long meetings, meeting for lunch and calling it a “date”, talking about books and our childhood and the future. That context will forever exist in that moment in time and so will my feelings for her, woven together in memories boxed up in a time capsule that I burried in the yard. In the present, those feelings are not mine to carry.
I will still feel this grief and write out letters in my mind of everything I wish I would’ve told her, but I don’t think I will ever say them out loud, and I am finally okay with it. Because knowing that our context is ever changing also gives me hope for the future. Maybe she will open the time capsule one day and dug up all my feelings with it. Maybe she will read this, and know it’s about us, and nothing will change. Or maybe, we will continue to be good friends that meet for lunch dates in pretty european cities and my context will lead me to another love story, totally new, totally different, but just as lovely.
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