"close your eyes. imagine how many hearts are beating around you right now."
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| I should be honest straight off the bat. My food pictures follow a storyline of their own and have nothing to do whatsoever with my ramblings. It just feels taboo to go through a post without any mention of something to nom on. Heh. |
"What is love? It’s euphoria-inducing chemicals – dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline and vasopressin, whispers my shoulder scientist. But that’s not the definition that I’m looking for. Because I can’t harvest oxytocin like picking cherries of a tree and give it to somebody else. And when love fails, I can’t just pluck all those hormones like wildflowers and throw them off a hill. How inconvenient. According to neuroscientists, it takes one fifth of a second to fall in love. How long does it take to fall out? What triggers the firing of those stimuli that release my love hormones?"
– John Green, Paper Towns
Fernweh. fern-weh. Orig. German: an ache for distant places, a crave for
travel, being homesick of a place you've never been.
Had I not known the
definition, I’d be stuck with the mental image of a naked Christmas tree, but I
am easily charmed by any notion of wanderlust, and I tend to romanticize that
version of desire. I discovered that term last week and, immediately, was more
than glad to slap the condition’s label on my left chest like a name tag. It’s
a societal norm, this habit to taxonomically stamp things, tangibles, intangibles,
identities. It’s so mechanical; WALL-E puts us to shame. But nomenclature sort
of gives this feeling of safety, of belonging. It is comforting to feel
identified, like you’re not alien, that you fit somewhere, even if only barely
snuggled between the nuclei of two syllables.
My shoulder angel is
probably cloaked in a lab coat, and instead of hovering beside my ear it is
strolling in my body struggling to decorticate the mechanisms and
qualify-quantify my biochemical components. Numbers, values, formulas. And when
it gets shoved aside by the occasional current of anxiety or nostalgia or
fondness or sentimentality, it is wide-eyed terrified and balled up behind my
vena cava pretending to be a crumb on the kitchen floor.
More recently, I heard about
philophobia through this essay by Mark Gisbourne, and I just know that my
shoulder scientist’s head probably poked out of behind my heart’s atrium with a
sparkly *ting*. Filos – from the Greek, “beloved, loving”; and phobos –
“fear”. The fear of being in love and falling in love.
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| Vietnamese Savoury Mochi Balls - Recipe to come in a distant future. |
;but
hold on, just a second. See, I’m not saying that I’m scared of the outcomes or
of the gamble, and I’m not scared of stumbling; I’m damn right insecure about
those things. Just like about anybody else. I don’t mind hopping the hopscotch
of growing up. What I am scared of is how my affect is
stimulated, of not being able to have a grasp on my emotions; I am absolutely,
completely terrified of losing control. To be perfectly honest, I don’t have a
single prognostic symptom, but the baseline concept is there in the definition,
and that alone is enough for me to want to identify myself as a borderline mild
philophobe, because I am just trying so hard to have a grip on the brain
circuits of my thalamus’ love network. I have this itching need to understand
how I feel, and sometimes, that comes to the cost of dissecting an emotion
until it is no more.
Perhaps what alarms me the most about the
romantic affect shared between two individuals is how much intensity has to be
distributed, how much emotion… in so little space. I mean, there are only two
of us. I don’t want my heart to burst open and to start thinking that cotton
candy is rainbow-flavored clouds.
Don’t get me wrong, I love to love, and I’m
enchanted by passions; mines, and others’, by how their eyes glow when they
talk about something with heated fervor. But see… it’s not the same thing, it’s
not as frightening.
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| I'm sorry to cut through the flow. But it's such a heavy-loaded text. |
“I fall in love regularly –
I’m in love with cities I’ve never been to
and people I’ve never met.
… [And] with each person whom passes me in
the streets, or who sits beside me on the bus.
Not in the romantic way—no we hardly speak a
word to each other.
But I sit, quietly observing all of their
body language and all of their expressions. Their smiles, and gestures; the way
they lift their coffee, or smile as they read that new text message, or count
the change in their hands.
I watch vigilantly, tracking the manners and
movements, and appreciating all that these people are. I spend some time
thinking about their families and lives, and the life they lead. I consider
what they might do for work or if they went to school and what for. When they
woke up that morning and how they did their hair.
I study the details of these people—that may
otherwise go unnoticed.
Researching each of them, noticing our
similarities and rejoicing in the beauty of human nature.”
– Unknown
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