Due to circumstances beyond our control, Verena won’t be home from Friday until Monday morning. No, nothing serious. Just beyond our control. A surprise, if you will.
Now you may think, what the hell does that have to do with anything? Surely this won’t turn into one of those tiresome personal blogs, where people whine about how none of their friends like them? And no, it won’t. But to those who come here for the entertainment of reading my disjointed thoughts on this world of ours, or those who come here looking for progress updates about their favourite pretentious game designer… well, this is a warning.
In the last three years or so, Verena and I have spent every single day together. Not every moment of every day, granted, there is the occasional exception for shopping and the like, but the majority of every day. And here’s the thing: we haven’t grown bored of each other for a minute. We’ve had fights, we’ve had bad days, but it was never due to being in each other’s presence. We function, as anyone who actually personally knows us, as a single unit. This is symbiosis in all the meanings of the word. (Sometimes to the point where it’s eerie. The amount of times we have the same thought, expressed in the same language, at the same time, is quite amazing.)
So, you may say, three days. Storm in a fucking teacup, mate. Other people don’t see their partners for months. Hell, a friend of ours is in China; her boyfriend doesn’t have nervous breakdown every five minutes, even though he really loves her.
And that’s fine, that’s all fine. But it’s not the truth about who I am, and what this relationship is. I’m not going to tell you that it’s better than other people’s relationships, because that would be preposterous. OK, so it’s better than the relationships a lot of people have, but so is a loaf of bread with a donkey on top. But I’m not going to claim it’s better than other people’s love, because I can never know that, and neither can anyone else, because love is vast and yet specific, common to everyone and yet absolutely singular. And if you think that’s cliché emo shit, you’re a sad moron with no experience of the real world.
I am by nature an empiricist. I am interested in the things I can prove, in the things I can understand. I think Reason is the only thing that’s keeping us from the abyss, and the only thing that can give us insight into the beauty of the universe. But to define Reason as the opposite of emotion, the opposite of art, is ludicrous. Reason is the process of discovering, by thought and experiment, the objective nature of reality. And through personal experience, and the legacy of thousands of years of human history, I can tell you that love is real and matters more than anything else. We humans know this, we have billions of test results on the matter.
This is the most important insight of all: love is real. It’s more than biology, more than chemistry, more than anything else in the world. And all the clever cynics, and all the nihilistic fools, are wrong. Ridiculously, pathetically wrong. Their pronouncements can be taken no more seriously than those of flat-earthers or climate change deniers. They are sad lunatics denying the proven truth.
Our time in this world is limited. I am painfully aware of that; sometimes too much so, perhaps. So to have to spend three days without my wife is not a small deal. Call me childish. Call me overly attached. But I’ll just pity you, because if you say that, you have not experienced what I have experienced, and your view of the universe is still woefully limited.
So we come to the warning. If I seem strange in the next few days – if I update too much, or not at all, or write silly, self-pitying things – then please forgive the confused ravings of a mind split in two and divided from its better half. I will be working as hard as possible, but given that I’ve spend the last day and a half having a nervous breakdown every half-hour, the results may be a little strange.
And if anyone ever tells you that love is an illusion, or a biological trick, or nothing but sex disguised… you can tell them that I told you to tell them to go fuck themselves.
Good night.
