Construct
Your love is constructed — love at first sight, love at second sight, social-media-stalker-ish love, love through writing, love through art, love when you love each other, even including those who are married. It is constructed.
You try to make sense of it and immerse yourself in the presence of the other, yet we are never satisfied. So what do we do? We hoard every bit and piece, constructing the concept of a person through our own subjective perspective. We nest in the uncomfortable comfort of illusion. Unfortunately, we do not so much derive a picture based on facts, but rather invent a picture, plastering the facts here and there according to our own preferences. For those who can gather a person’s artifacts every day, directly, their picture is not as abstract or as imaginative as those who rely solely on social media as a tool for this artistic process
(2021)
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But I have learned better.
We will never have a perfect replica of someone inside our heads. We can only see them through this imperfect set of epistemic tools, since we are, as we know, human beings.
That’s why we interact, we talk, we argue, we experience things together. Love is not supposed to be something you create alone — in your head, with your fantasies and what-ifs. Meaning-making and intersubjectivity require another person, allowing them to correct you if you mistake them for something else. In the end, we are all trying to figure out the other person with the limitations we have as human beings. That’s why the existence of this other person will never be enough for our quest to reinvent love every second through reality.
(2025)
