“Do you think anyone ever really loves anyone else anymore?”
The water is crawling slowly up the shore. You can’t see the sun. He’s hiding behind the clouds again like he has been all week. The forecast had been sunny in the high eighties, and they were right. Partially at least. It wasn’t sunny, but the air was almost thick enough to see and the weight of it was enough to break your legs if you tried to walk for too long. She was sitting next to him. Dragging her finger across the surface of the sand creating these nonsensical shapes like a long lost language she barely remembered how to speak. He sat with his arms wrapped around his legs. His eyes lost somewhere over the ocean far away from the shore.
“You’re not even listening to me are you?”
It sounded more like a statement than a question, but he was used to that.
“I’m listening.”
“Well do you?”
“Do I think people ever fall in love anymore?”
“No, you’re not listening to me. I asked if you thought people ever really loved each other anymore.”
“How is that any different?”
“People fall in love all the time. I know that. But that isn’t really the same as loving someone else.”
“I’m not sure I can agree with that.”
“Think about it.”
She doesn’t carry on right away. She told him to think about it and that was exactly what she intended for him to do. A sun now sits above her absent minded art. It’s simple. Just a few lines emitting from a circle like a child would draw in first grade.
“We spend our entire lives falling in love. We hear all these ideas about what the world should be like, and how people should treat each other. And it all sounds nice, but everything is so impractical, and people are so quick to move on from things that don’t yield quick results. We never stick with anything no matter how nice it sounds. We fall in love with the idea that everyone should be treated equally. We love the idea of a world where people are treated more like people, and less like machines. So what do we do?”
“I don’t know. What do we do?”
“We sit behind screens and go through the motions like we’re making a difference. Sometimes I wonder who we think we’re fooling. You can sit on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr all day long and rant about how messed up the world is, but it’s all so pointless. We know we’re not really changing anything, and it’s not, like, something we feel deep down or anything like that. It’s so fake we know it on a surface level. But everyone else is doing the exact same thing, and everyone knows that everyone else is being fake.”
She stops talking for a moment. Taking a breath and rubbing out her first grade sun.
“We fall in love with the idea. But nothing happens and in a few months something else will be just as important as equality, and we’ll write and rant just as much about that. We fall in love in our heads every other hour, but no one sacrifices more than a few hours of their day and maybe some money. Until you sacrifice more than you would ever want to there’s no way for anyone to know that this ‘love’ we have has any substance.”
A crescent moon has replaced her sun. She turns to look at him.
“I don’t think it’s so different. I’m afraid because it seems like we fall in love with people like their ideas. You can go through all the motions and make everything look absolutely perfect. The guy can send her the sweetest good morning and good night texts everyday. He can buy her flowers, and hold her hand at the movies. He can pay for every meal, and hold open every door. All to the point where he actually convinces himself that he’s fallen in love with this girl. Unfortunately everyone is different and it’s just not that simple. They want to end up in different places. She wants kids. He doesn’t. He wants to focus on his career, and travel the world. She wants to settle down, and start a family. He has no time for her dreams, and she isn’t very tolerant of his. Neither one is willing to sacrifice anything for the other. So everything falls apart because he was looking for someone to wake up to on the few days a week that he was home, and she was looking for someone who would actually be home. We fall in love with our ideas of people, and I’m just not sure anyone falls in love with another person anymore.”
“I think we could.”
“Yeah?”
She watches him as the tide tries to work up the courage to touch their feet.
“Maybe if we ever just looked up. Forwards for once, and not backwards. Maybe if we tried we could see what was coming. Maybe if we knew what was coming we would know who we would want to go through it all with. Like if you knew you were going to struggle to hold a job for the rest of your life. That would be hard right? So whose hand would you want to hold when you realize you don’t have the money to pay rent this month? Who would you give up the last slice of bread for when you can’t afford any more food for a few more days because payday isn’t until Friday? Because sometimes that’s what life is like, and it is in those moments that everything seems to fall apart. On the surface it seems terrible, to lose everything that we know, but the reality is that we lose everything we have that we don’t need.”
The clouds are moving overhead. You can’t make out their shapes because of the way they’re stacked together, but the way he stares up at them makes her think he see’s something in them she can’t.
“Sacrifice is a two-way street. It’s not only about who you want to be there with you when you feel like you’re getting dragged through hell. It’s who wants to be dragged through hell with you. Not only that, but who would be happy being burned alive as long as they get to hear you breathe. It doesn’t happen often, but yeah, I think it does happen from time to time.”
*~W.C.