What's Inside?

Funny I should write this after hearing a 1992 Haddaway song. I mean, what on earth has just happened that a one hit wonder would strike my fingers to move across a keyboard with emotions that meant anything. Ugh, makes me cringe to think about it and then I somehow find myself bobbing my head to that beautiful yet obnoxious beat. "What is love? Baby, don't hurt me..." blah blah blah. But I'll be damned if it does not make me smile. It's an eerie reminder of my youth that has flown passed me at a rate I do not comprehend and for some god awful reason it sparked a flurry of unresolved queries in my already vacillating mind. But what the hell is it really, love. Ugh, really, right? And why on earth does my mind still ask this vapid question after so long. And by vapid I truly mean unanswerable, silly, dumb, almost trite. Do we ever really know. I think not. And I'm not really sure we are supposed to know. It may defeat its purpose. And I do trust that is ok. But yet it pisses me off that I ask this question without an answer.

I believe we are raised (to be read...'conditioned') with an illusion of what love is meant to look like, to feel like, to be presumed to be. That is the key, it is a presumption, because how on earth could we ever be fully aware of what it "is" if we can never actually know what is in another person's heart and mind. There's no way truly. So really it is an actual "presumption". We say we trust, or we know, or we have faith in another's feelings but how can we?..Feelings....they are so personal, and sadly, wavering. We assume another human being feels something the same when we say I love you, something complementary or at least similar. But synonyms don't function in the same capacity when it comes to emotions. And I believe that might be the beauty in them. It's that mystery, the unknowing that keeps us curious, keeps us delving, keeps us feeling. Or maybe it is just that which actually "keeps" us from feeling completely, that which keeps us from trusting, from loving completely, from living completely, the unknown. Maybe that it is what is what keeps us from giving ourselves (myself) completely. Maybe it is within that uncertainty that lies the agape.

To put it simpler or not so much, because lord knows simplicity has never been my forte. Have you ever been to those 'touch-feel-experience' art shows in which you place your hands into a mystery box and you're supposed to determine what is inside. You start with the anticipation of what might greet you on the inside, unknowing, trusting almost (which is beautiful really, the blind trust piece), but nonetheless you reach your hand slowly towards the box, surely because you feel you're in control, and then your hand slides trepidatiously through those curtains that feel like lead weights hanging on your every thread of doubt and then you're in it, deep in it. Not trapped so much, but too far in to back out now. And you take a deep breath and feel it out, literally I suppose. You feel your heart rise as if it could defy gravity. It leaps gallantly to meet your mind and ironically it happens to win that match between sense and hope, and despite your every urge to deny it, somehow it hushes your reason. And then you touch it, your fingertips sense its every shape, its every curve and all its textures. Is it soft, is it rough, is it smooth, is it real, is it yours. Your mind flurries with questions that your senses fling at you as if you were in a dodgeball tournament of emotions. Trite, but an adequate description nonetheless. And you will know what I mean.

And now your hand and mind are stuck. Stuck because you can't determine what it is, stuck because there's no way out now, you're in it despite your brighter and stronger intuitions to pull your hand out with a fury and just move on to the next party trick that life may throw at you because I am so good at those, those curves life throws at you. So you move your fingers around, tracing every curve, absorbing every touch as if you had to memorize them in case they disappeared soon, because it is all fleeting in the end isn't it? You close your eyes and soak it in, as if your pores could absorb every ounce of feeling that your sad heart and reckless mind could consume. Thirsty, deprived, weak factions of your better thinking, clearly. But yet you let it drip in slowly, almost defeating the strands of time because it means something or so you think someone will take it all away. So you let it course through your veins, igniting each and every one of your senses to an extreme, to a point where your breath is taken away by the collision of it all. Breathless, you take it all in, if only to feel it once so that maybe you can discern what it is you are actually touching, because it may not be real.

The box, remember, is and always will be a mystery box. Who's to say you're meant to know. Wouldn't that kill the adventure seeking portion of this forsaken journey they call the momentum of it all. So you're in the box, your hand is reaching out, and you feel it, you touch it, you know it (you think), you recognize it (maybe), you move your fingers as if they knew the chord that needs to be played. And then that's it. It's done. And then you're meant to define it, recognize it, name it and claim it. And then what...

Oy, the damned box, es una tortura. So you pull your hand out, you know what's inside, or at least you think you do. And you swear to yourself that you know what was inside. You ponder all options and resign yourself to an answer that suits your self sacrificing or maybe deprecating motivations and decide that you have no clear idea of what was in the box after all. And so you reach your hand back out from that space that felt so safe, so natural, so much like home. Because, after all, you only "felt" it. Maybe your other senses were fooled. Salt looks a lot like sugar after all, or at least that's what you tell yourself.

But it is that mystery that keeps up reaching in, reaching out, delving in, jumping in sometimes, maybe too quickly, but still diving in head first. And we do it over and over again. Like tugging at a slot machine, hoping at one point our penny bet will bring us a jackpot. I suppose the mystery box really is a game of chance. And I'm good at the long game, so I guess I'll play my chances. But know that I'm betting on that box being what I thought it was, and it almost never is.