About the text 1: Today’s text is a short one around the song “Ai to Iu/あいという/To call it love” by the band Plenty. Since it’s a japanese song, and even then, I don’t feel like selecting and dissecting individual parts, you can read the lyrics below. It’s an approximate translation I did chopping different pieces from some sites that tried to do the same.

There’s no lie, right? Right now, between us
Perpetually, is the rain pouring down
Guess there are no chairs. Still, inside your heart
Are you crying? Tell me

This pain, this pain… It’s unfulfilled
Drop by drop… It sept in and disappeared

How would you call it? How would I call it?
Some people would call it love
But I still don’t understand it yet
[If one was to say] “I want to see you”
What would you do? What would I do?
When there’s no promises between us
To call it love—it’s still too sad
To call it love—it’s too ephemeral

Having a room where you don’t invite others into
That’s not a sin at all, but
Since we don’t have an umbrella, let’s hold hands together
It feels warm, right? Tell me

Someday, someday… Don’t let me wake up again
Hold me tight, tighter… Don’t let go of me yet

How would you call it? How would I call it?
Some people would call it love
But for now, it still won’t come true
If we passed by each other
What would you do? What would I do?
When we find no goal to anchor
To call it love—it’s so aimless
But to call it love…

I run after your name that is fading away into the distance, just to lose sight of it, over and over again

Even if we can’t complete each other
Even if we can’t hold each other
Even though we are hurting each other
For now there’s still just the two of us
They call it love
What would you say? What would I say?
It’s okay not to understand yet
To call it love—it’s still too sad
To call it love—it stretches on endlessly

I wish… I keep wishing…

I had a conversation with a friend. He told me I needed a support network. I told him I had it, it was this person and that one… But then, he stopped me. The people needed to be present in person, not through the internet. The options diminished radically. I had this one, but I don’t think he would go up the hill where I live to meet me. He lives really far from the college we used to go to, but even farther from where I live. “You need to have someone that can go visit you if you’re feeling down”. I told him this friend probably wouldn’t go. “Even if you were dying?” I don’t think he would. Silence. I didn’t have anyone else that qualified.

There was always a distance between me and other people. It grew if I was down, as I would hide further inside myself. But to understand people, to me, it’s not as if you’re trying to speak a language you don’t understand the rules of, as many neurodivergents. It’s a matter of expression, of language. And my language always sought to be very deep.

“Love”, however, was the language I didn’t understand. I, however, had the worst teachers. The grandmother who raised me was divorced, so I grew up without knowing my grandfather; I have never met him to this day. My mother would always fight with my father, and for a good reason; even when she gave him three kids, even while she was dying with cancer, he cheated on her with multiple women. They were always fighting.

None of my friends in school had boyfriends (except for some of the girls I fell in love with; they would always find a boyfriend in the middle of my pining). In college, one of my closer friends had a girlfriend with which they seemed highly incompatible (they broke up later), and the other one told me about wanting to break up with his significant other multiple times (they’re still together).

All around me, people didn’t seem to understand how to choose their other half. They’d get bored of them. They’d feel lonely alongside them. They’d choose someone so they would stop choosing. They’d have someone so they can have regular sex. They’d have someone so they could tell others they’re their girlfriend. They’d have a partner for their daily boxing ring.

I never had a girlfriend. So, I don’t know what is love; at least not this “girlfriend” love. For a long time, I refused to say that I “loved” the crushes I had in highschool and college. They never felt like love to me, even during the periods in which the feeling was overwhelming. Even if it made me cry, or especially then. It never felt like love. I knew love hurt, I knew love wasn’t supposed to be easy, but it was not because it hurt me that it was love.

People say you can’t love someone else before you love yourself. I don’t think this is correct at all. The correct thing to say would be, to me, you can’t love someone else if you don’t understand yourself. And I didn’t. For a long time, I had no description under my name. I didn’t know what constituted my taste, my existence was as shallow as any word I’d say.

Even though she didn’t started the process of my understanding, a girl appeared in my life, making me have a lot of certainties. I was certain of who I was, and I was certain that this was love, now. I suppose that realizing that this feeling was real and it was impossible, at the same time, felt like discovering you have a role in your life for something they don’t teach anymore. It felt like God coming down and giving me the information that my soulmate actually died a few years ago, and I was supposed to live the rest of my life with the ghosts of many feelings.

Many things happened, and we started to talk again, after a long pause. But this time, it was all about everything being unsure. There was no certainty, and it was somehow scarier, as strolling in an open field you know is surrounded by hidden archers must feel like. But the view was nicer, even if foggier, as if I threw a light source in the ocean and watched it light up the blurried underwater gardens.

I discovered that I didn’t knew what love was. There was no need to be certain so quickly. I can’t say I know what love is if I was never loved, as the true understanding of the feeling comes from the receiving of it, as if you’re creating a crude clay object with a hole in the middle, that only becomes a cup if you pour water in it; deciding not to do so, it could become anything else. As a shirt that you can only tell if it fits you after you wear it, I am underdressed for this meeting.

Love, perhaps, is quite more unsure than I presumed. I remember my first kiss. Laying down, after spending a long time kissing this person, I remember having only one thought, which I accidentally said out loud. “I’m scared”. They heard. “Scared of what?” I didn’t know, it just came out. But I knew it came from somewhere, all I had to do was find it. And as I was so exposed to the other person, in a way I had never been before, the answer came easily. “I’m scared of creating something irreversible”. At that point in my life, I barely had to make any decisions. I never had someone else. My life was completely safe, with almost no risks of ever hurting someone. But I was by someone’s side now, we were both laying next to each other, and all I could think was that even though the moment was great, I didn’t love her. She was the one attracted to me, but I took too long to realize I wasn’t. I was scared of creating something irreversible with her. So, when love seemed to appear in this one other girl, I felt it was love, also, because of how I wasn’t scared at all of the irreversible, after closing myself from other girls for a long time because of this fear of relationship. I would never step back from this one. But as time grew no answer, I felt she was the one that could. As time grew no answer, what left me fearless only led me afraid in the spaces between us she wished to create.

It leaves me anxious to feel a nameless thing, sometimes. Sometimes, it’s fun, as if we’re creating a completely new thing between two humans. Sometimes, I feel like time is coming to a close. Sometimes, I like to plan things for moments that are very far into the future. I suppose it is from the nature of the communication between two beings to leave open spaces, those being filled by the other, or by time or by silence.

I think discovering another person is dreamy, getting into parts of them that are uncharted. But I think so because I think this is love. While love around me felt shallow, ready to break and a torch to highlight each other’s incompatibilities, this can’t be love, then. Love, I think, must be simpler. Or true love, something I’ve been told exists, is more about the light than the shadow. For eyes tired, still, I’m in the dark. More and more, I think love between boyfriend and girlfriend must be very similar to the love between friends. The things that end up lasting, at the end, are the fears and the half words; those are the ghosts. And I am unready to love anyone until I understand that to fail to lose, you can’t win. There’s still a player left to lose.

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About the text 2: I’m not that interested in explaining more of this post, so if you wish to know how I feel, the song at the beginning of it will suffice.

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