Sup loser. I miss you.
I’m writing you this letter because saying "I love you" is a cliche. I suspect I’ll make a fool of myself on that front pretty early in our knowing each other. After maybe just a few weeks of talking, enough time for me to have built up a model of you in my head, I’ll know you’re you, and those words that we’re not allowed to say too soon because they’ve been ruined by everyone we have to share them with will rise up in my throat. Maybe you’ll grasp for a joke to interject, to try and rescue me, and blurt out something retarded like “your grandma has AIDS”. And we’ll laugh.
It will be true then, though, just as it’s true now, and has been since I was a little kid.
I’m sorry it’s taking me so long to find you. I know how profoundly lonely you are, and that life feels incredibly hard in insidious, subtle ways. You struggle to find meaning and connection while everyone around you seems so well-adjusted and able to effortlessly date and partner up. Meanwhile if you get asked out by another finance bro with psychopath eyes you’re going to become an arsonist. Burn what you need to, I’ll be a fugitive with you.
I’m writing this letter to tell you you’re not crazy. It’s not you, it’s them. How do I say this gently? Most people don’t have souls. To have a soul is to be differentiated. It’s to have an intrinsic orientation that’s nonnegotiable, a set of inextricable values in relationship to which some things are distinctly and inarguably good and others evil. Most people simply don’t. They’re essentially a clear liquid, ready to conform their being into whatever shape is called for by the social moment.
Because they have no real internal orientation, they have no ability to find intrinsic value or beauty in anything or anyone beyond the hedonistic pleasure it can provide by satisfying their base instincts. This makes other people entirely fungible to them, and “love” becomes a commodity.
Most people don’t really love the person they’re with, only that person’s contribution to their life. Men love women because women fill the cold void of loneliness. Women love men because men are a seawall between them and the violence of nature. Both love the other’s ability to elevate their status. It’s a diffuse, impersonal sort of love. Its object is interchangeable. Any woman can warm a bed, any man can fix your broken thermostat. And it’s highly conditional. The love lasts as long as the contribution is maintained. When the seawall cracks, it gets replaced.
This is what’s behind the retarded howling of the dating discourse. Love is not the dating market clearing. It’s not where the bid of my attractiveness meets the ask of your standards and commensurate value is exchanged. And it’s not chemistry. It’s not that you watched the same drivel sitcoms as me and can fluently exchange the same tired patterns of delightfully sassy banter. It’s not even compatibility. It’s not that our diets, lifestyles, and family plans are sufficiently aligned to spare our independent bossgirl lives the insufferable burden of compromise. Cliches aren’t created by overuse, but by misuse. None of this is love, and if you’re disgusted by it, that is righteous and good.
The thing is, you don’t just have a soul. You have a beautiful, unique, intricate one, which makes you not just differentiated but like, really fucken differentiated. As a result, ever since you were little, you’ve felt different and alienated and isolated. Forced to carry your gentle heart in your hands through a hallway of razors. Forced to smile and shake hands with an uncountable legion of bobbleheads who seem like a different species. Forced to bend and contort the natural whimsy of your mind into the tiny box of thought patterns that stave off socioeconomic oblivion.
I’m writing this letter to give you courage despite all of this. The flipside of the fact that having a soul makes you capable of exquisite suffering at the hands of daily life is that it also makes you capable of exquisite love. This is how the stories have lied to us. They depict “true love” as being available to any blank slate Mary Sue. In reality, true love is only available to weirdos.
True love is rescue. It’s meeting the person who frees you from the hell of solipsism. Whose soul is the same fractally weird shape as yours, and in whose presence you are finally and truly home. There is no market for that person. For almost everyone they are completely imperceptible at best and negative value at worst. But for one, they are the universe. And because the connection happens on the level of the soul, it is completely prior to any higher thought or free will.
For this reason, true love is also a prison. When you find the person who inspires it, you don’t have a choice. You belong to them. It’s complete and irreversible and you don’t have a choice. It’s good if they’re attractive, sure. And even better if they share some of your interests and live in the same place as you. But at the end of the day, if they get fat or take up something stupid like gorilla feces fingerpainting, it won’t matter. They own you and you own them. Your bodies as property. That's beautiful and righteous and good.
Everyone I will ever love or have ever loved, romantic or filial or otherwise, I’ve always loved and will always love, because I’ve always been able to conceive of their beautiful soul. Even when it could offer me nothing but the pain of longing, I’ve loved it. It doesn’t matter whether I’ve said the words that a legion of psychopaths has obliterated, or if I've heard them said to me. Words are only spells for the unensouled.
I’m writing this letter because I want you to never wonder or fear whether this type of love exists in the cosmos. It does, because I say it does, because I insist. In my heart, if nowhere else. I refuse to let it not.
Sometimes romcoms will try to dimly gesture at this type of love by having the hopeless romantic describe the woman he’s looking for in extreme detail. Ted from How I Met Your Mother says his future wife paints robots playing sports, her favorite food is lasagna, plays bass guitar, and her favorite book is Love in the Time of Cholera. This is a caricature. As if the deepest most important parts of a person are what their favorite food is, or that they can reliably predict it.
I don’t give a shit about what food you eat. You can be a cannibal for all I care. I’m yours because you’re deeply, earnestly good. You have an unshakeable compassion for the capacity of living beings to suffer. Because of how deeply and richly you feel. Everything is meaningful to you. In the age of post-irony, when all the turning of the human heart is made plain and productized and sterilized of its magic, and nothing is left but the scraping together of gears for advantage, you are earnest. You laugh at jokes and you cry at songs. You hate my enemies right alongside me. You have a world behind your eyes.
I’m writing this letter to you because I miss you and I want to feel the shape of your mind in mine as I write it. I miss your mischievous smile and the melancholy behind your eyes and the worldbuilding we’ve done in the space between our breath that makes outside seem fake and gay. Sunsets? Fucking lol. Try an inside joke that’s lasted 50 years and become indecipherable in its complexity and nuance to anyone but us.
Above all else, I’m writing this letter to tell you that your grandma has AIDS. Hang in there, I’m coming.
Cody