Thursday, August 27, 2009

"We are not who you think we are. We are golden!"

My mom always says that nothing stays the same for three weeks. I think she's right. As I stand on the precipice of another set of new changes, it's scary. The world I thought existed outside the ivory gates has not been as easy as I thought or what I thought. In a way, I embrace the challenge. In another, I embrace myself. And in a third, I embrace whatever the future has in store.

Saturday, August 1, 2009

So-called Modern Love

Everyone knows that I'm a hopeless romantic. I spend a good portion of my time watching so-called "chick flicks" or more respectable romantic movies. I love Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte and even Meg Cabot. I am in many ways, a sucker for romance.

I started reading "Modern Love," the collection of stories from The New Yorker, in the dead of winter after finding it on a friend's coffee table. Many of the stories have spoken to me, and I've tried to reconcile a world where love is not defined by my parent's experience. I'm beginning to accept that whatever romance is for me, I will not be them. It's too late. I've dated too many people to have that experience of falling in love with and marrying someone I met the first day freshman year of college... or at least, if I have that experience, there will have been people in between. And it does sadden me to know that my life is not going to look like theirs--especially when they are the model for what I want romance, a good relationship, and even the rest of my life to look like.

Instead maybe "modern love" is spending your whole life looking for that right person. There are mistakes along the way, and people take time apart. But at the end of the day, the picture clears and the right person eventually enters the frame. Even if it's years later, the people who are meant to be together end up together. And it's those other relationships, the heartbreaks, the years of not looking, or of looking too much, or of learning to live by yourself, or learning to live with someone else... it is all these experiences that best prepare us for the way we live now, the way we were meant to live, and the way we end up living.