Last living souls

Is human nature really more vast than a amalgamation of feelings, ideas, emotions, and desires? Can we predict what we will think, feel, and look like in 30 years by observing our parents? It's moments like these - when I have just set down Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, that I wish wholeheartedly I could write truly beautiful poetry. Prose sometimes fails to bring across the complexities of thought that can appear from out of thin air to affect our lives.

Last night I wholeheartedly agreed to move in with what is arguably my newly adopted family - my downstairs neighbors. I laugh with them, look forward to spending time with them, and agonize over their Christmas presents more than my own birth family. I feel like they are my brother and sister. But love burns, and this is what worries me. This morning I woke up with a worry in the pit of my stomach that by giving up our separate lives we would gain one of frustration and dislike of each other. Rarely have I lived with anyone that I didn't end up wanting to choke at some point. And I've gotten the good ones.

Maybe this stems from some kind of fear that those who really get to know me will inevitably hate me too. So in response I am diving in head first. The new guy in my life has probably heard more about me from my own lips than anyone else in recent years - it's almost as though I have some kind of disease to tell him the absolute truth about myself whenever I open my mouth. Modest Mouse, that ole half-cocked philosophy team, sing that "no one really knows the ones they love. If you knew everything they thought I bet you'd wish that they'd just shut up." So am I fearful for a good reason?

Some level of self-doubt is a healthy thing. Over the last three/four years I've had to tear down a lot of self conceptions and rebuild them on a new foundation. I had set romantic love on a pedestal, giving someone else the power over my life and ideas. All I could think about was why he left, and why I was never good enough. What I had to replace that thought with was the belief instead that he probably wasn't good enough. As my friend so aptly reminded me, "I will not be lame, because I am not lame, and damn it people like me."

Where am I going with all this? There is a rational thought pattern behind this, believe it or not. I think we may all just be fumbling for a light switch in the dark, hoping and grasping for something to bring us closer to the goal of illumination. If we happen to find someone else in the same room, doing the same thing, we can consider ourselves really lucky. I hope that's what's in the cards for me.

Beauty comes to those who have been waiting for something that is bigger than themselves.