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Discover Meekly: Let's get... Closure?
A Moment Apart has a few songs that I’ve fixated on, but the titular song is the that I come back to over and over again. It has a haunting hook, a melancholy, not quite human, but not quite not human voice that melodically sings “I love you baby / I loved you all wrong.” At least that’s what I heard on the first two-dozen plays. The internet disagrees, some posts suggesting “I loved your mess / I love you more”, another “I love you most / I love you more now.” Those are the only words, over and over again to a sanguine, danceable beat. It’s like that gorgeous, painful moment when you finally hear in “Hey Ya” by OutKast “But ya’ll don’t want to hear me / you just want to dance” and the whole song changes.
I had a great professor who has a whole collection of buzz words, but one of her favorites is “undecidability.” When a thing is either one or the other, but also both. Two possibilities at once, but also neither.
I guess what I’m trying to get at is that there’s something impossibly difficult about a relationship where everything was right but it fails anyways. My mind is constantly running scenarios like “what if this part was a little different or if I had sad this or if I hadn’t have done that or if he was a little more whatever.” But that is such unkind thinking. Bell Hooks writes in All About Love, “this process alone did not ensure self-recovery. It was not enough. I share this because it is far too easy to stay stuck in simply describing, telling one’s story over and over again, which can be a way of holding on to grief about the past or holding on to a narrative that places blame on others.”
But there’s fundamentally a fear at the root, for which Hooks offers, ““Love as a process that has been refined, alchemically altered as it moves from state to state, is that “perfect love” that can cast out fear. As we love, fear necessarily leaves. Contrary to the notion that one must work to attain perfection, this outcome does not have to be struggled for—it just happens. It is the gift perfect love offers. To receive the gift, we must first understand that “there is no fear in love.” But we do fear and fear keeps us from trusting in love.”
“I love you more now” can’t possibly be it, can it? I don’t know how to feel gratitude for something with a painful absence. It’s even harder to feel that gratitude for someone gone. But wow, did I love our mess. I probably loved us all wrong, but damn I’m trying to love us more now.