Warring Tendencies

God, it's been a nearly a week since I last posted. I've had guests since last Friday - first hippies then family. My house was home to much boisterous merriment. But then, yesterday, after my mother and sister had gone, I felt the chill of loneliness; that or the heater wasn't working. I still can't tell. It's strange when someone you've spent a week with leaves. During their stay, near the close, there's a readiness for it to end - for the party to be over. Once they're gone though, there is a feeling of something missing, like leaving your apartment without your phone.

Companionship is a peculiar thing. It's pitted directly against our own ingrained sense of self reliance and independence, ideas that are essential to our collective notions of freedom and liberty. We value our own sovereignty, yet as social creatures we crave the feeling of togetherness. There is something mesmerizing about people working in concert, whether a complex orchestral arrangement or intricate choreography, a team of bank robbers or two people making sweet sweet love. People like to feel as though they're a part of something, but also, apart from something.

To spend a significant amount of time with a significant other produces an unveiling of sorts. There is a loss of those pleasant subtleties and softnesses, like tea made harsh and bitter from too many steeps. In time, the pretty pittances and forgivenesses you grant one another become mean and meager. Conversation becomes increasingly more tendentious; your affections, dissolute. You stare at your partner as though through a stained bathroom mirror, and in their eyes you see that yours too is tarnished. Frustration with yourself, and then with them; a reflexive movement toward the preservation of self and then the lure of unified victory - of overcoming obstacles and upholding allegiance to one another. Eventually our failures force us to cling ardently to our outrage, undoing us.

Oh, our embattled love.

We become burdened by our found follies, like old wallets stretched out and bloated by time's passing, swelling with worn plastic cards, amassing a malignant debt. Something for nothing.