It's the Same Old Song

For those of us of the more human looking persuasion (I am not a troll, nor am I Angelina Jolie), I think a very common occurrence, even a rite of passage, is wanting someone you can never have, someone who will never want you back. In my case, I’d observe whoever he was from afar, fully aware that reality and my own cowardice would never permit anything remotely resembling romance to spring up. Someone coined a phrase for it: “He’s out of my league.” Sometimes you see someone so breathtakingly and impossibly beautiful and wonderful, you doubt that he or she is even in the same sport.

In my experience, these people, often without their even knowing it, carry with them expectations and fantasies, which frequently have nothing to do with who they are. Sometimes, though, you love someone whom you do know, and if you are imaginative-minded like myself, you concoct all sorts of wonderful scenarios in which this person will come to his or her senses and miraculously, perfectly, find that he or she loves you back.

That kind of love is like a wound that doesn’t heal. In one of my favorite series of books, The Belgariad, they talk about how when a god is wounded, he’s wounded permanently. Humans were built to break and heal; gods were never meant to break, so they don’t have the capability to heal. Does that mean I have a godly wound, or that I just have many, many years of therapy ahead of me? Possibly both.

There’s another wrinkle though, as there usually is: this wound/love doesn’t have to be romantic in nature. In my case, my longest obsession, the person who will never want me back, is my sister.

I nursed this bleeder for many years, not even knowing what it was, until recently, when after yet another hurtful incident that left me feeling like a twelve-year-old at twenty-three, my brain out of sheer desperation gave me the answer. I wonder sometimes if you have to hit a critical mass of emotion before something becomes clear. In this case, it was the following: I am not good enough for her to want.

At least, I figure that’s her logic, deep down next to her bones where people’s ugly truth lies.

The irony is that some of the most wonderful people in the world (in my opinion) do need me, and love me, and see me for exactly who I am. But why do we place the most value on the thing we can never have? This is not to say that I don’t see what I have: I do, and I appreciate it more than my own grasp of language can express. The people I love build my insides, but that means, unfortunately, that part of my insides is always bleeding.

Part of me, a growing part of me, has grown so tired of the same emotions, playing over and over again within me. The Four Tops said it best: it's the same old song. After all, it’s the same old rejection. She has not ever noticed I grew into someone very much worth liking (if I do say so myself), so her rejection is the same rejection that it was ten years ago. And the self that can step away from that horrible, wonderful, sacred core of who you are in your family, the self that went away to college and found out that who I am is perfectly fine exactly the way she is: that self finds this same old rejection very tedious.

My brain has hit several critical masses lately, because another gem came to me when I was brushing my teeth in the middle of all this mess: If after nearly twenty-four years, I don’t have your good opinion, maybe it’s not worth having.

And yet, and yet… a crush on that beautiful person in the distance does not go away because you tell it to. My aching want to have my sister see me and like me and need me does not go away because I have become a whole person on my own. I believe we don’t leave our old selves behind: we absorb them. They’re in there somewhere. So I have twenty-two years worth of selves who want her, and one who is willing to walk away. I am having a hard time overcoming my own inertia.

Is it masochism? Is it that hope springs eternal? Are the two mutually exclusive? Maybe it is simply a part of a very human condition: loving someone you can’t have. Hopefully the selves I’m growing into will be stronger than the ones I have absorbed, because I don’t like to think that I have another twenty-two years to wait before being able to walk away.