Love Drunk Stupid High

We get drunk and high because it’s Friday night and the week’s been hell. We discuss raunchy things in sophisticated tones until we both laugh so hard our tummies hurt but really we don’t notice. As I refill our drinks, my swirly eyes take in the little blue birds that are fluttering all around the garden. The crickets are cricking and the locusts are simmering and I am full of the most luxurious self-annihilating bliss. The warm summer night air is soft as it smooths into the cool of silky dark.

They will tell you love should be this way or that. Should be some precise amount of intellectual, emotional, sexual, social – I don’t know, what, ahh ‘moral’? hedonistic? – connection. But when it comes down to the real thing you may often find yourself feeling like you woke in the middle of a dream wondering how in the hell any of it got so out of hand. It’s so much messier and more confusing than you could ever imagine. All the poets and philosophers and intellectuals have tried since the beginning of time to define it, capture it, to predict or dictate its formula. Tell us how it should feel and be and look and behave.

But none of that matters and none of it is true all the time or maybe even ever. Just when you think you understand your love, or believe you can swallow it or stomach it or hold it or mold it or pin it down, out of the blue it grows wings or claws and morphs into something else you’re gonna have to figure out how to figure out.

The truth is we like the game and we like to be kept guessing. When he acts a fool I hate him but when we make up we do it so loud with the windows wide open I wonder if it’s even the slightest bit possible the neighbors don’t hear. I can talk a thing to death and somehow he takes it all in until I wear myself out. Nobody knows why anybody works or doesn’t in the end. Not even the ones on the inside.

We seek the answers but refuse to believe them anyway when they finally reveal themselves. We fight and we kiss and we fuck and we do stupid shit just so we can feel alive while we are here because god knows no matter how many broken hearts you can mend or feelings you can manage to pour into words, none of any of it is forever.