Under my skin?

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.” Neil Gaiman

If you have ever been in love, and it was the real McCoy, then you would agree that Mr. Gaiman is right on the dot.  When you truly love someone, you give them a piece of you, you become  your most vulnerable self and you do that for life.  Look at parents and their children.  What is the purest form of love if not that? And how that love hijacks us and takes us to places we never thought we would venture. Who in their childless years could ever dream of the sacrifices, unconditional love and care we give those ungrateful short people who take it all for granted and repay us with little more than contempt? But do we stop? Not on your life. We usually don’t, unless we are really not okay.

When we love another human, we do the same thing, we give them our all, we wrap our world around them, we remove all our defenses and armadillo shells, we are as naked as the day we were born and definitely as vulnerable. I am here, defenseless, yours, come kill me, or worse – abandon me, or worse still-don’t love me back .  I draw a lot of parallels between the romantic kind of love and love of parents of children. I don’t see the difference in intensity and the length the lover is prepared to go for the sake of the well being and happiness of the loved one. It is one of the yet to be fully explained enigmas of our world. This thing called love. What we wouldn’t do for it, and what we would do in its name.

We need to understand what makes a heart love so much, and who knows maybe it is not our heart that loves, but our spleen, liver, ears, eyes, toes, neck, skin, knees. We conveniently burdened our hearts with the full responsibility of love, owing to the fact that our pulse races and our heart seems to work extra hard when we love. But what if there is so much more of us at work loving away, silently, quietly in the dark, making us adore whoever our knees choose to adore for example. Why should our heart be given all the credit, and then suffer the fall out for the choice of our love?  I think the eyes have a lot to do with it, seeing, reading, watching a loved one. Our ears, falling in love with their musical voice, their words, their sighs. Our mind, futile in its battle to tell us it can’t work, and our skin winning every time. We hardly notice when a loved one slips under our skin-our largest organ, without permission, we just are suddenly inflicted with their presence within our epidermis and sometimes they go deep into our dermis-or inner skin, but these are extreme cases of love that is so strong, it survives cremation.

Why? Why do we love? Why do we base so much on love? Why can’t we be a thinking unfeeling race making choices and basing decisions on calm and cold calculations? Do we really have a chance of becoming the ultimately rational species that we imagine the future is becoming-much like imagined humans in sci fi movies. I will research that eventuality and when I find out more about our possible conversion of a society ruled by our cerebrum, I will definitely let you know. I will write the shortest blog post about it. Rationality is super efficient and brief. x+y=z. Oh, the fun of that. I’m sure you can’t wait.