love

I will start by saying that I don’t know much about love. I’ve experienced it, I think, at certain times with certain females. I’ve known it, for sure, with my mother and my brothers. I even loved complete strangers, concepts, books, albums, paintings, wisps of hair. I could try and describe love as a higher entity, profusely giving and receiving in the same breath. I won’t, because I would be talking about a subject I am not an expert on.

The thing that confuses me the most is that all the loves I’ve known are so different from each other that it’s incredibly difficult to describe to you.  Each love asks something different of me, moulds me differently, casts my mood differently. So while there might be some kind of ultimate love, something called L.O.V.E, I’ve only known different kinds of love. (No kinds of love are better than others says Lou Reed and who am I to attest.)

Romantic love seems the most volatile. There have been times I’ve fallen madly in love with a girl, dreaming of her, thinking of her weeks after our last awkward encounter, imagining her at times both, uh, forlorn and lonely. I’ve done this for years. For a decade. And then, as if from nowhere, that love disappears. There is a different kind of love instead — at least when I’m feeling lonely — a knowing love, a less volatile love, a love that sees the big picture and not just her perfectly shaped, uh... eyes.

The romantic love I’ve known with girlfriends has always been so intense, so overwhelming. My mood and desire and jealousy and lust all rise and fall as if my penis and my mind were helpless passengers on a bus to a  desolated destination. This is why we say, I fell in love. Choice is gone and the whole thing feels like a wild, out of control ride.

Being only 24 I acknowledge that maybe none of this love was real love. Maybe real love, by definition, is more altruistic. Maybe real love doesn’t get jealous, make demands. Maybe real love is never clingy or selfish.  But it sure felt like love.

Maternal love is a whole different mess to me. As a child, I always felt my mother’s love. When I was 11 she was diagnosed with a mental illness, and ever since I couldn’t help but doubt and be conflicted that the abuse wasn’t carried out by the real her, but nether less love was not given nor received.  The whole relationship is fraught with a certain kind of anxiety — the fear of hope in her eyes, the guilt of indifference and anger in my heart. I didn’t realize love fully until I became the guardian for my younger brothers and knew that often talked about sublime love of a parent for their child. It’s not a relaxed, chill, steady flow of love. I can be maudlin one minute, irate the next, indifferent ten minutes later, and guilty regardless as I must somehow be fucking them up. Such, alas, are the stakes of growing up today: everything we do is a mistake and it’s all so well documented on the internet. As for my father, even today I feel like I inevitably fail to meet  his expectations. If he does indeed love me, he obviously didn’t like me enough as a person to stick around.

So this sibling love, a beast of another sort all together. This is of course not true for everyone. I know some people who really don’t like their siblings, who judge their siblings, who are indifferent or hateful towards them (perhaps justifiably).  I also know people for whom their sibling is their best friend. And with that friendship comes all the ups and downs of romantic love. She’s so annoying when she doesn’t pick up! She was so annoying at that party!

For me, however, siblings have been both friends and indifferent brutes living amongst me. They have occupied this distinctive space of always just being there, loud, constantly demanding or expecting and moaning. As kids, my brothers and I all shared a room for a while and enjoyed all those delicious, hilarious, beautiful conversations that go on when no grown ups are around.

As young adults, we’ve grown apart physically and acquired different tastes. For the most part, our friends are distinct. We might only see each other every few months. In fact, when one was in prison, I hadn’t seen my brother in over two years. Another brother is now attending a university up north, with new friends and a new life. We always talk on the phone some — a couple times a month, perhaps.

Yet, we were never indifferent or angry to each other. On the contrary, it was precisely because we have that one love that you can absolutely take for granted, that love that wants nothing, demands nothing, while in its way giving everything. It is the best kind of of course.  Of course I’m still looking out for my brother! He’s my, well, brother! I know he’s done wrong, but he’s still my brother! 

This sibling kind of love can be so even, and so dramatic, and all the more powerful for it.  As we were never really friends, there was no social anxiety or resentments (compared to strangers who I obviously have more in common with, but lack that certain connection). My brothers are the only people who have never made me feel like a bad person, even when they thought I was one. My girlfriends? Fuck, I think they used to get their life power from pointing out and making me feel like a loser. My mother? She may have loved me but, if she really does still remember who I am her eyes tell me nothing except that I’m a cruel stranger constantly telling her what she can and can’t do.  My brothers always made me feel like the impeachable carer who was there to protect and care for them by any means.

I was trying to explain this to a friend of mine who holds mostly disdain for her brother. Later that night, after our conversation, she sent me this passage from Zadie Smith, a writer I don’t really know but it is perfect for what I am trying to say:

People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two loves, but this, too, was great; sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating. Before the world existed, before it was populated, and before there were wars and jobs and colleges and movies and clothes and opinions and foreign travel — before all of these things there had been only one person, Zora, and only one place: a tent in the living room made from chairs and bed-sheets. After a few years, Levi arrived; space was made for him; it was as if he had always been. Looking at them both now, Jerome found himself in their finger joints and neat conch ears, in their long legs and wild curls. He heard himself in their partial lisps caused by puffy tongues vibrating against slightly noticeable buckteeth. He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.

This past week I have been let down by everything I thought I cared for and loved. Rejected by the girl of my dreams, let down by management and my part-time job etc.  However, my greatest heartache, the one thing that has kept me up on nights is recently (and the third time) my brother being arrested by the police. After years paying fines and court bills, having the police raiding the house and scaring my mother, I’ve made the decision to not support him anymore. Yesterday over the phone I told him  “what I give you instead — not as my friend, not as your father, but as my brother: a love that just loves you, without money, without demand, without expectation. I don’t hate you, I’m just tired... I’m exhausted from constantly being hurt by everything I love and care for.”