This blog is officially dedicated to my home: my beloved friends (yes, that does mean YOU), my Babies who know everything important about me, my family, my amazing Mother and Father, my supportive and hilarious brother and sister, my beach, my California, my now deceased puppy dog, the list could go on.
Oh how profound cliché can be when cliché had no prior meaning in one’s life. I believe the sayings that are most popularly deemed cliché tend to relate to love, which I also believe makes the most sense. Love is the emotional state most sought after in this world, it doesn’t surprise me that the world in all its time and diversity is running short on ways in which to describe the profundity of love. The unfortunate thing is that these sayings/descriptions that are so cliché and dime-a-dozen represent something just the opposite of dime-a-dozen. They represent a fluidity in life, a harmony between people, a comfort that needs no words or fluffy pillows, the greatest source of joy and pain in this world, something that will take a human to the edge of his/her life to attain, an emotion that is desired sometimes with the same strength that it is feared, and yet we reduce such a multifaceted concept to feeble words and typical gestures (i.e. Valentine’s Day proceedings). These then become described as cliché and therefore deemed very unworthy of thought or pause in life. With phrases such as “love is everything” or “All you need is love” or “love is like a river, peaceful and deep” (first person to get that one elevates themselves 10 points on my scale of cool), the meaning of love in one’s subconscious begins to depreciate until it hits the low level of cliché.
I am guilty of the use of clichés, it’s true, because they are useful and efficient. They get the point across without having to give a speech about what you’re trying to communicate. The problem is that they cheapen the concept they describe. You start to define love through phrases like “love is everything” which would actually be quite daunting if you think about it, love is tree love is Jimmy Fallon love is my professor giving homework, therefore I tree you? Regardless, these sayings begin to roll off your tongue and down your back like water off a duck, and if you’re not careful, these generalizations will start to encompass your perspective of the thing itself. That is where I have sat for most of my life, in the seat of cliché definitions of life experiences, and that is the seat I very dearly wish to leave.
It’s not as if I have sat in this seat for all the moments in my life, there have been times where I knew the meaning of love and I knew the impossibility of trapping it into my cage of words, so I didn’t. But life is life, and we slip in and out of reality like Argentine taxi’s slip in and out of lanes. It’s easy to believe that love is what words define it to be and nothing more because it’s much more simple than grasping the reality of the entity your words try in vain to explain. The fact is, love can only be truly communicated through you and by you and a word is only the first step of expressing what love really is. A sentence is nice too, maybe even a song, a speech, a Bible verse, or a pathetic blog post; these are all very good and well intended but at the end of the day they are all just echoes down the corridors of your memory.
Love is more than this; love is more than an echo in a memory, more than a word or a letter dripping with sentiment. Love is a constant, an enigma that traverses this world heedless to roads, oceans, relationships, political correctness, guns or poverty. It is the most dangerous and reckless rebel yet the safest and most secure servant the world has ever known. It is beautiful because it cannot be trapped or tamed, it can only be held…
How ironic am I right now, trying to fit love into words when the whole point of this entry was to refute that process. No matter, it’s written and that’s that. I started writing this about a month ago with the original intent of explaining how much I miss my home and what new value I have placed on home. And just to be clear, this entry was not inspired by any boy nor is it designated for any boy, this is just one more attempt of mine to write out the movement of my heart.
