LIFE - THE GAME AS IT IS PLAYED
Life is always confusing and messy. The rules keep shifting, disappearing, reemerging. The players enter and leave unpredictably. Alliances and enmities are forged and broken almost whimsically.
The only way to really play this silly, ludicrous game, rather than pretend to play it while really just avoiding all the confusion and pain, is to get fuckin’ dirty. Get right in the mud. Wallow in it. Like a Goddamn dog. Have a fucking blast in that mud, and don’t give a shit if someone looks at you funny for it. Get tackled, and tackle, as the rules may or may not demand. Carry people and be carried. Walk. Run. Trudge. Roll. Where to? Wherever you fuckin’ feel like! It’s your game.
Have you ever been super dirty, and then taken a shower? I think that feels great. Getting clean. But it’s always most satisfying after you’ve gotten totally wrecked, bruised and filthy. A shower doesn’t count unless you did something to earn it aside from sitting around collecting your own secretions.
Play in the dirt. Fall in love. Get hurt. Hurt someone, not out of malice, but out of love for the game as it is played: Messily.
Collide with the lives surrounding you. Writhe together. Get bruised and like it.
I’ve got all these words and thoughts right now I just gotta throw them out somewhere.
Let me just get real concrete here. Got the abstractions out of the way now.
I’ve got a Situation with someone. It’s weird. Like, whenever someone asks me to tell them what our relationship is, I just kind of go blank. I end up saying, “It’s weird.”
I’ve known her for less than two months. A week into it, we had a long talk about how it was pretty clear we were both extremely attracted to each other, but a romance wouldn’t work because reasons. And that’s okay with me, you know? That’s fine. We can be friends and not romantic. I’ve been down that road twice already; it’s familiar and actually kind of comfortable. I can and do enjoy unrequited romance; it has a place in my inner life.
She hasn’t done it before, though. She’s struggling with it, and its slow development. It’s only been two months, but she feels like it should be resolved already, that I should fit squarely in the Platonic or Romance boxes instead of floating somewhere in the middle. (I, meanwhile, keep everyone in their own boxes; I like that better.) Complicating matters further is that she ended a pretty involved and toxic relationship in January and is still reeling from that, and her ex and I are superficially similar in one particular way that’s calling up a lot of bad memories for her. But we’re working these things out, you know, growing together around this issue.
My one major concern though is that she just wants the hurting of it all to be over with. She wants to skip it and get to the good stuff. She’s not seeing the bruises as a necessary part of playing the rough, dirty game of life. She’s wants the triumph without the struggle. And this concerns me because I’ve seen people run away from the struggle, and therefore the triumph, because they don’t realize that they’re the same thing at different stages of development.
I don’t want her to run away. I want her to keep playing the messy game with me, the ups and the downs alike. For both of us, so we can have the triumph of the game played as it should be: With others.
If she doesn’t keep playing, though… At least we’ve had some triumphs already.
Oh, cool, I just found a new scar.
Thanks for reading this. Or, if you scrolled over it with glazed eyes, as is perfectly understandable, thanks for allowing me to take a few seconds of your time.
