Filling a Whole

It isn't the absence of a past partner that inspires sadness, it's the lack of a new one. At least that's what I've noticed. It's shocking how quickly the memory of a previous flame can be extinguished by a promising new fling. We thrive on closeness, connection, things shiny and new, on feeling understood. When something gives us any of those things we cling to it and wrap it in our affections. Music does this, drink, beauty too. Where am I going with this? Ah, on my way home tonight I saw a girl who looked like a love from long ago. My heart stuttered when I saw her. Dammed up memories broke free and flooded my veins. The temperature of the air was just right. It lent an icy crispness to the wistfulness numbing the present. Nostalgia has a way of whacking you out of time and hurling you heart-first into old echoes. You always come out buzzing, drunk and disoriented as a ringing bell.

Speaking of drunk, not drinking has started a kind of stirring in me. I find myself longing for something I wasn't longing for before. Cock, mostly. Kidding, though I did have chicken for dinner. Alcohol has a way of filling a hole; with a quicksand that serves as a marvelous substitute for substance. Where does that hole come from though? And that innate desire for something more, something better? It's there in every great idea, every act of love or kindness, every revolution, every little curiosity or question, each wish and every shooting star. It is potential. What a sophisticated concept. To see something's potential one most appraise the thing's future worth based on its present condition. This requires the observer to establish a hierarchy of values with which to measure the thing's usefulness while also assigning a temporal dimensionality to both the thing and the observer's relation to it. A strong, fruit-bearing sapling becomes more coveted to the agrarian than the wilted runt covered with tree fungus. With potential there's intuition involved, and a gamble. One must rely a little on prediction and hold onto the hope that their assessment was correct.

Often potential, and more often its lack, becomes a source of deep dissatisfaction for us; when love didn't work out the way we'd thought, or the trip doesn't go as planned. Expectations are bound up in a thing's potential and we forget that an expectation is not the same as a promise. We conflate the two and develop a dangerous sense of entitlement that often leaves us deeply incensed. What we see in a thing is seldom more than just a projection of our hopes and desires onto it. When that potential is lost, ruin and depletion take its place. We impinge on the world our predispositions, our peculiar proclivities and predilections for preference, scoffing at the means which do not suit our ends; balking at and condemning all opposition, anything contrarian. And in doing so, ironically, we deplete our potential for flexibility, creativity, adaptability.

The whole thing is hopeless madness, every last bit of it. But what else is there?