Dreams and Madness.

Why do you like him?

For most of my life, from a writing perspective, I’ve written fiction. Sci-fi colored fantasy. I made a whole world as a child and told a lot of stories within it. I made characters that embodied my greatest hopes and fears. Most of this world never saw the light of day, but some of it seeped through the cracks. I composed music for it, distantly hoping my fantasy world would become a movie someday. One piece was performed before a live audience and got a standing ovation at a fairly selective summer composition program I went to in high school. Vague plot points were told through the lyrics I’d write for the songs the rock band I’d made with my friends. Some of it made its way onto a long lost LiveJournal page. A fraction of that made it to other corners of the internet where people give their original works a go for public consumption. Most of it still resides in endless notebooks of backstory, scribbled maps, and character profiles. I made sculptures and paintings with subjects from this world as well whenever the opportunity presented itself in my school art classes. So today it remains a somewhat unknown fun fact that essentially all the feedback I’ve gotten for my fiction writing was in response to fan fiction. 

Harrowing tales told using someone else’s characters are enjoyable in their own way. I’ve certainly churned out many novels worth of content, feeling good about (according to the comments) being the highlight of some anonymous reader’s day. It was particularly interesting for me to weave a slow build of romance throughout most of these tales - half the time with quite tragic endings which was enough that amongst at least a handful of people, I gained a bit of a reputation for being the “read at your own risk” author. After all, as my mother pointed out, in my original stories no one ever seemed to fall in love.

Many fans of my work even joined me on tales with friendship and family at their core though, which seemed to pull out similarly strong emotional responses. Hundreds of dedicated subscribers. Thousands of comments. It was the alternative I found in college after my understandably brief involvement with my school’s fiction writing club. And despite my legitimately traumatic early encounter with fan fiction depicting the rape of a young girl, I’ve grown to enjoy the space for what it is. I haven’t published anything in that world for a while, but sometimes go back to be surprised by the twists of my own stories and think, “You know, this wasn’t that bad,” or otherwise discreetly log back in to fix a heinous grammatical error sometimes a decade after the fact because I can see my stories still get new views and even a new comment once in a blue moon.

The thing about romance is that there are so many examples of it in the stories we consume from birth that I really found no difficulty incorporating it into my own writing. I knew the formula. I knew the lore. I knew what made people cry. I knew what made people melt into puddles on the floor. Because from my perspective, romance was equivalent to fantasy. If you can write about dragons, you can write a tragic tale of two lovers. However, what I still struggle with today is understanding what any of that has to do with real life. 

“Why?” I ask, on the rare occasion when I can muster up the nerve. “Why do you like him?” I asked the other guitarist in my rock band. “You had no idea he existed two weeks ago and now you’re dating.”

“I just do,” she said. And maybe I would’ve pressed more if I didn’t suspect that they’d be broken up in a month. That’s how it always went back in high school, after all.

“Why are you crying?” I asked her at that point. 

“Because we broke up and I’m sad about it?” she said, momentarily shocked enough for the tears to pause. 

“You broke up with him. Shouldn’t you be happy? If you’re sad about it, you should un-break up.” That upset her quite a bit more.

“Your father is my best friend,” my mother insisted when I pointed out that no one seems to really marry their best friends. 

“No, your best friend is Tainetta. But you didn’t marry her because you didn’t want to have sex with her.” Even for me, that was quite a bold thing to say to your own mother. But to my credit, she couldn’t dance her way around that point. “And since you’ve been living with him for the past thousand years and not hanging out in any significant way with anyone else, he became your best friend over time.” Once again to my credit, after mulling over that conversation for another six months, my mother reached out to Tainetta and a few more old friends. They now have made it a point to meet up for brunch every few months while my father joined a club that connects him with people from his fraternity from back in the day. 

“Now I’m going to need to start all over again,” Molly says after telling me quite casually and with no details that she had ended it with her boyfriend who she had previously described as being “the one.” 

“Why?” I ask. 

“Because I have to get one.” 

“You could just have more male friends.” Her face shrinks up in disgust.

“Ugh, no. I already have one male friend and that’s already one too many.”

“And yet you want a boyfriend.” She laughs.

“That’s just how it is, unfortunately.” 

I’m still confused by that conversation all these years later. 

“Why are you with your boyfriend?” I ask the internet sometimes. The answers vary. Some say that they are in love. Others say he’s useful to have around. Most shrug and say, “I don’t know, just because.” I joined a chat for lesbians once, wondering if I could relate to them more, but they spent a good hour talking about their favorite boob sizes so I’d say the experience was just as confusing to me as everything else I had been witnessing. Eventually, I am usually accused of being a troll or willfully missing the point because humans are complicated and brain chemicals exist and this is all just a natural part of life. Meanwhile, I can write at length about why I like each of my friends. 

What many people agree with me on, either explicitly or implicitly, is that romance or limerence is in reality a form of madness. It is far from unusual to equate the two. All of my opinions about this topic are taken straight from the source material, which is why in the past I have been confused by those who appear insulted when I say it plainly. 

But then I figure, well, the stories I have written are not real life so perhaps all these songwriters and painters and all forms of artists over the centuries are not talking about the reality of these relationships either, but rather just expanding on a long drawn out collective lore that ultimately serves as propaganda that encourages these partnerships in our day to day. So when I ask… “Why do you like him?”... I’ve broken some type of rule. Perhaps we’re not supposed to ask or think about it very deeply. However, I do think it is more likely that the answer is a highly personal one that is awkward for people to explain outside of rehearsed wedding vows. 

It’s what I was thinking about recently when Molly and Kevin came into town for our birthday brunch (Molly and I were born only ten days apart from each other). Kevin came along because he assumed he was invited, but by now I have sensed that any further significant involvement in Molly’s life moving forward is contingent on Kevin liking me. Being entertaining at Sadie’s wedding seems to have done the trick, and when he walks into my living room he jumps straight into a conversation with me about stage pyrotechnics. Both of them end up sitting across from me at this brunch place, super chill. He’ll chime in every now and then. And honestly, I don’t hate the guy. He’s a little dull. But I find all men dull so that’s not very surprising. Dull is a high compliment from me. Anyway, I’m wondering, “Why do you like him?” Why is this working? Why are you restructuring your entire life to include him? 

That’s all just the surface stuff too. If I step back even a little bit and remember what ending up in a relationship with a man actually requires: Enthusiastically agreeing to your own subjugation, being on the receiving end of violent acts most commonly known as sexual intercourse, solidifying yourself into a fog that, like my mother, you might not wake up from until decades down the line when you wonder, “What happened to all my friends?” When I remember that, I remember what Kevin really is in this whole bizarre situation. I wonder again why Molly seems to think she needs a man to begin with. Because if I were writing this piece somehow from a male perspective, it would be quite different.

Once out on tour, the crew made it known that they were disappointed I hadn’t planned any fun outdoor activities recently opting instead for indoor recreational things like bowling and arcades. I pointed out that, at present, it was the middle of February and that we’d been in the wintery tundra of the great American prairie basically since Christmas thus making it too miserable to have any sort of fun outdoors. 

“But it’ll be March 1st when we have off days in Denver,” one of them argued. “Can we go to the Rockies?” 

The Rockies. Like the Rocky Mountains. I pull out my phone and zoom out on the massive mountain range for dramatic effect.

“You just want me to take you to somewhere in all of this,” I say to the response of several nodding heads. I sigh. 

Ten days later, the group of us are suiting up to take a ride out to Golden Gate Canyon National Park where we’ve rented supposedly heated cabins for the night and have decided on a medium-difficulty trail. It felt like we’d only been driving for twenty minutes before all our phones lost signal and our ears started popping in the face of increasing altitude. What had been clear streets in downtown Denver had turned into white as far as you could see on the path we were now on. The winding road ahead of us was covered in salt and all around us, untouched snow towered above. But hey, it was March 1st. Spring had sprung. 

The trailhead we’d picked could barely be spotted after we parked our van in the otherwise empty lot. Even though it wasn’t actively snowing, the strong winds filled the air with snow dust and I only made it a step and a half on the surface of the white beast before my legs sank in past my knees. I laughed incredulously.

“We’re gonna die out here!” I shout back to my companions. But I was the tour manager so I took the lead. “I think conditions might be better past the tree line,” I said after we realized that most of the blanket of snow before us was a pond. Even though this was my first real hike ever, I probably pulled the bit about these horrible conditions somehow improving once we got into the trees from some adventure movie in childhood. And despite feeling like my life was in imminent danger, I did begin to get filled with a bit of a childish sense of glee. 

Turns out I was right. Within the trees, the snow wasn’t as deep and the air was clear. We trekked up and up and up around several winding bends. Large animal tracks were spotted and I made sure we went in the opposite direction of where those were headed. Perhaps an hour and a half into our journey, we reach a good observation point atop a large rock. Some of the crew members celebrate, taking out flasks they’d packed away with them. I took the chance to unwrap an energy bar sitting next to the show’s stage manager on a big rock. 

Stretched out before us was a sight I had often seen on screen but never in real life. Towering mountainsides all around us covered with snow and evergreen trees. Everything was silent and still. It was like our little adventure group was the only people that existed in the whole world. I had gotten so used to the cold at this point that taking a deep breath of sharp winter air didn’t bother me much at all. Others took out their phones for photos. I knew trying to photograph this would be useless. I let an odd feeling wash over me. 

I found myself thinking of my father’s words. An engineer by trade leading him to work long hours at a refinery during my childhood, like the rest of my family he was a devout Christian if you probed him about it.

“Look at this,” he told me, sitting in a park one day pointing to the grass, the trees, the flowers, and bushes. “Look at all this and convince me that this didn’t all occur by design. Scientifically, I see no other explanation.” 

While sitting there, a speck somewhere deep in the Rockies, didn’t cause some type of religious awakening in me, it did make me think of music. 

This would hardly be a unique response. Nature has inspired music for as long as humans could form beats or notes. It was probably indicative of my mood at the time that it was Beethoven’s 7th symphony that started playing somewhere deep in my ribcage. Emotions running in from whatever issues I was facing at the time colliding with something so serene and dangerous and out of my control. It was humbling to be at nature’s mercy, even on an established hiking trail in alright conditions. The city I had grown up in felt like it was a galaxy away.

That night, our cabins advertised as being heated were predictably freezing. The tiny heater that rested between the beds of myself and the stage manager whimpered sadly but we sat scrunched up by it in our sleeping bags splitting our time between listening to the raucous antics of our coworkers who were outside around a fire chugging vodka and speaking to each other about our motivations in life. 

She told me how much she valued my presence on that tour. She said she had never been so on board with the way a tour manager carried themselves and treated other people. She spoke of her love of dance, how it felt like to dance and to teach others. She spoke of the absolute safety and openness she felt attending a women’s college and expressed jealousy that I’d gotten a chance to grow up feeling that same safety. I told her about the thrill I got being able to solve creative problems with her daily and test the limits of our stamina with such a grueling tour schedule. I told her I admired how she conveyed notes and direction to a cast that wasn’t always the easiest to handle. We spoke about what would come next and agreed we’d jump at the opportunity to work together again.

These are some of the moments in life I think about when people speak of intimacy. Two people brought together by a common challenge, appreciating the camaraderie that grew from it, and sharing with each other our goals, hopes, concerns, and frustrations. Or to be at the peaceful mercy of a mountainside that seemed to reach just short of touching the sky with a companion next to you. To many, this might strike them as a rather dispassionate thing to call intimate. But to me, the warmth I feel in such moments is something significant and worthy of immortalizing in writings such as this. It’s what drew me to team sports, to all manners of art, and to my friends. It’s what I value most within my own family and community that raised me. It is the driving force behind my own music compositions and fictional stories. 

But it all seems to pale in the face of limerence. Infatuation. Obsession. Unbridled passion. Emotional dependency. “True” love. Romance. That thing that makes us human and gives us purpose… so I am told. I was told recently that my lack of familiarity with this state is akin to being blind or deaf. And while there have been a number of times I have been called inhuman or mentally underdeveloped, I do admit this blind and deaf thing has struck me more than I thought anything could at this point in my life. I thought of my time in the Rockies and interrogated its value in the face of this thing that most songs on the radio are absolutely focused on. Where if you took out “love” or “baby” and replaced it with “Jesus,” every radio station would suddenly become an ode to the Almighty. 

I don’t view myself as a repressed individual. Quite the opposite, I’ve always felt very free to approach life with a “give it your all” attitude. I connect with those who seem to have the same or similar passion for teamwork, art, skill, mastery, and the friendships and mentorships that bind it all together. To exist this way seems as natural as the existence of the Rockies. It humbles me in similar ways, leaves me in awe, and fills me with appreciation. 

I have been asked if it makes me sad not being loved. To that question, I can only be confused. I feel plenty of love. I’ve felt it my whole life. It’s not possessive, it typically doesn’t rip me apart, and it is hardly cinematic. It’s quiet, steady, and sure. So maybe that’s why the accusations sometimes sent my way hurt a bit. Because it feels as if no one can see what I see. They just see nothingness and feel sorry for me.

It has me realizing that perhaps the value I have assigned to all I have experienced with others is very dissimilar to what they feel for me. Or maybe it is the same, it is just dwarfed by the scale of this chemical insanity that you should relentlessly search for and surrender to because… just because. Part of me is waiting for the desperation to set in. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. Maybe it is dropping in slow motion. Maybe I’m waiting for a train that will never come, plenty occupied by my own journey to lament over someone else’s excessively. 

I truly feel that giving into the madness is to lose something of yourself, sometimes, forever. And while I’m certainly not opposed to entwining my life with someone else’s, to be teammates as I have probably mentioned before, it would be rooted in the intimacy I have described here and in other writings. It would be based on the intimacy found in my fantasy world. It would be with my best friend. And I would speak fondly of her to anyone who asked me, ‘Why do you like her?”