Holidays invariably cause us to think of our great loves, don't they? We'll be lost in the mindless ritual of it all -- cooking the stuffing, sending out cards, buying a gift for someone we barely know -- and then be stopped cold, blinking amid the neon, wondering why any of it matters. Perhaps then you'll think of that one person you were lucky enough to find. If not, you'll probably think of that person who ripped your heart out, stomped on it a few times for good measure, and still causes you to reach for that extra blanket to fend of the relentless holiday chill.
Love stories warm us when we need it the most not because we savor the sentimental or are constantly looking for a good cry. They're comforting because they expose the pathetic vulnerability we all share; we're all total losers in the blinding glare of love's light. What's not reassuring about that?
We've had a lot of great love stories on Open -- a great, searing one just today in fact -- and we'll spotlight a few oldies-but-goodies over the weekend (feel free to suggest your own in the comments, below). But we really hope you'll share your own great love story in the next week (be sure to tag it: love story). We'll do something special next week with the posts.
Emily Holleman
Mignon Khargie
Scott Rosenberg
Thomas Rogers
Rebecca Traister
Dan-onymous
Salon.com
Comments
Done with Thanksgiving? Ohhhh no. We'll have a special Turkey Day edition coming . . . oh, you know when.
I have to ask, why don't you write more of your own pieces? "we're all total losers in the blinding glare of love's light. What's not reassuring about that?" ... seriously, that's so good. Ditto the whole open call. You really let it rip this time.
Oh wait, is it possible you have a story for us? :)
I Just Didn't See
They say you shouldn't sleep with anyone at work. What's the sweetest euphemism for it, again? Right: Don't shit where you eat.
But apparently, regardless of the stigma, we as a people will gladly eat our own shit, or more technically, sit in a room inhaling shit-saturated air.
They also seem to warn the young against fucking old people--old people will take advantage of you--though it's harder to reconcile the prevalence of daddy-baby-love advertising with such admonishment.
So I must be a twice a fool at least, both for breaking the half-hearted laws which govern our sacred professional environment, which in this case is meant to spare co-workers from picturing private parts and their interaction publicly; especially since co-workers can't help but do that, right? Because they have the right to...unless you're holy-ly married or otherwise paired off.
He worked at the office; actually an 8% stockholder in the company, as a result of a mother's beguiling act of unapologetic iniquity. But that was not so much immediately visible as the light in his large, wide-set eyes, and the tension in his tiny infantile mouth, was not so much glowing as glimmering. Flickering--one could say--like the last warbles in a decrescendo-ing trill.
Still, despite the castrating mother, and the dulling eyes, the spright with which he would inflate his tone, in bursts of sincerely affected affectation, naughty puns that were cheap bait for infantile humor, shone through the botched execution by sheer magnitude of his will.
And I. I thought as I saw: This is a person not dead yet. Rare enough to find in "young" people, devastatingly stunning to see in aged eyes. Laughing, tired, exasperated eyes.
They told me that here is such a thing as too much. The drug-stained augury of your generation was correct: information pathways can become overrun, leading to a body politik whose children are effectively 'stillborn'.
As are his children. Bright and beautiful, processed in the public school system as "retard/other", in the clutches of mediocre psychiatrists cadaverous claw hands. Stillborn? God, no. It's a reality he's already accepted. Already chosen to swallow. But still the hope, still the room for light to escape.
Here is a man, in the late late hours of the storm--wherein for the past century, though we've done nothing buy exponentially magnify our productive potency, we are still yet barred from breaking and worked tirelessly by nobody but ourselves, and the founding principles, unquestionable, of our unspoken cult--and here is a man, in the late late hours of the storm, where most have either died or joined the enemy, and he's standing firmly, quivering: a hand waving out a pile of bodies.
Now, normalcy, unquestioned, offers no privacy protection for relationships beyond the purview of the wholesome, you understand. Even this reaching out, this simple, well, wailing, frankly, would not, will not count. We could not be in love, it must end in some shallow second-class screaming fight, all it could be is fucking. fucking. FUCKING.
Because we chose a way of life specifically privacy-unprotected, it's as if society has the right to indulge her murderous lust on these ob-scene transgressors, us. We asked for it, didn't we?
Without any stable precedent, without any support--to the contrary--, we let bake and bask in the glory of believing. For no reason. With no probable path to victory. With one certain path to a certain death. Mine or his, but sooner his. Unlike death and other mechanisms whose unpredictability is only remote and theoretical, together we entered into a pact to action... To act in belief. And because of the necessary uncertainty of our action: to pre-forgive.
I'm not a woman. I never was. My breasts were slashed in the womb. And though he knew me as one, held me as one, fucked me as one, I knew my secret, just below the skin. We were nothing but a last spark, inside of a cosmic crystal, which is congealing all the time, making what was already fading even more obscure.
The belief now hangs in the balance.
The forces drawing us back to the unspoken, protected, assumed- strong.
If normal shall not bind us, it will be because, even in the bitter cold, our mutual dying is able to set off a particular kind of violence, that specifically makes a new kind of dying possible again. Like an atomic bomb inside an infinite crystal, enough to return everything into cosmic milk.
Kudos
And I love your new avatar. Um, but it does suggest that you have been hanging out with Freaky.
She went away but then I heard an actual roar. Next thing I knew, she was clobbering me with the vacuum cleaner.
This may sound horrible, but if after 6 years of marriage you can get a woman that mad you've got it going on.
I was looking for a TV and video (as a student) and found a notice on the board in the Students Union of the university.
I went to get the TV and the astoundingly attractive woman gave me a whole box of videotapes to go with it. I remember thinking "forget this moment, Sam - you'll NEVER be able to have a girlfriend the rate you're going, let alone a girl as beautiful as that"
I left the leads to the TV at her flat by accident.
The next day I asked her if she could cook.
I asked her if she would cook a meal for me to try in the week.
She agreed.
We've been together since (5 years or 6 years)
I liked the meal. I asked her to marry me.
We have a baby daughter, she is beautiful (actually she is 2 now). She has a sister, 10, as well.
That is my love story...
The worst part which turned out to be the best part, is that my wife is a foreign national. She was not granted a visa because the government did not believe our love story. We were separated for 1 year almost. I had to get her back, I just had to. And I did.
Around that time I was interviewed online by a success coach called Bob Dignard Fung for the launch of his "magnetic thinking corporation" out of Costa Rica. You can listen to it if you want, I will find a link and post it on my blog, soon. Thanks.