Love is an Alloy
All the loves in the world
I have grown up watching and reading romance. Boy meets girl and heavens break loose with little pink hearts and red hearts and white hearts and all hearts. The movies keep you vying for a story of your own. But whom do we want to tell these stories to?
The kids?
What if I don’t want kids?
Is it worth running across the airport for someone as my self-respect struggles to catch up and never eventually does because it has no legs?
What is self-respect anyway? Another name for fear? A pretty packaging for our insecurities?
Sometimes we fear wearing our hearts on our sleeves so much that this heart finds its way up to tickle the armpit. I don’t know if I am laughing or crying but this heart is better off on my sleeve.
Love stories, at least on screen, have had a primary trope of family opposition. It’s not a story if everything is easy. It’s in the chase or in the drama. Basically, you must be sad for a few months before your happy ever after. But much like all the other things in movies, this too, is a bunch of lies.
In the real world, love does not exist in a place of conflict.
It cannot exist when it has to fight all the other love that is going to come, that already exists. We constantly add and subtract people from our lives, and they all pour parts of themselves into the vessels that are simply our consciousness.
For all of that to exist in harmony, the constituents of your vessel of love must be of the same nature — density, pH, chemical structure, temperature response, and conductivity.
Any new love must be of the same nature, kin to the one you get from your family because that is what keeps the vessel filled for a long time. Familial love may be austere, it may not be expressed in theatrical ways, but it is the only one that cannot give up flagrantly. And so, we have no choice but to introduce love that mixes with this preexisting love.
That being said, as I play with this thought bubble. I think about the many emulsions, milk, bile, blood, yolk. and I cannot help but be alarmed by the limited shelf life of these naturally occurring emulsions. They constantly need a shake, a preservative, an agent to bind them, hold them — a lifetime of effort.
Minor inconveniences may cause them to separate — emulsions do not stand the test of time, temperature, or pressure. So, while you may enjoy your time in the excitement and diversity, it is a difficult path to tread on.
And while that effort may seem worthwhile to some, it is just a Sisyphean existence to me.
Any new love must be like a solution (for the sake of this analogy and my innate desire to land pathetic puns), completely dissolved, evenly distributed at the molecular level — unable to separate in normal conditions.
And if you are lucky the universal set of your love will form a solid solution, an alloy — different metals mixed at an atomic level creating something superior to the individual components. Like Nitinol (nickel-titanium).
Nitinol, emblematic of a love that remembers its shape, resilient in the face of life’s contortions. It’s a love that, like this extraordinary metal, can stretch under the weight of trials and spring back, unscathed, in the aftermath.
In this universal concoction of affection, each element — be it the steadfastness of family, the fervor of romantic entanglements, or the unwavering presence of friends — contributes to an alloy unlike any other. This blend does not merely coexist; it transforms, transcends, creating a mesh of experiences, each new addition reinforcing the other.
So, in the end, when you pour all these loves into the crucible of your being, what emerges is not just a mixture but an alchemy of the heart. A kind of love that’s evenly distributed at the molecular level, unyielding to the ordinary pressures of life. It’s an alloy that does not fear the tests of time, temperature, or turmoil.
And in this continuous play of amalgamating loves, you realize that every new addition, every new bond, must resonate with the existing symphony, harmonize with the preexisting melody of your heart’s alloy. For this is the love that endures, the love that adapts, the love that triumphs — a Nitinol love.
