on loving (well)

do you know what i do? i stare at the same people everyday, and we make conventional little smiles and vaguely friendly noises at each other, but we do not know each other, and we do not really love each other. or perhaps we do know each other, and this is why we do not love each other. no, i see the small underclassman boy that i smiled at every day during the musical, a precocious and empty smile that meant nothing at all; i see him bite his lip vigorously in the parking lot, fat drips of rain drooping and spattering all along the thin line of his shoulders, struggling, and i stand woodenly under the metal awning, straw-filled, pulling the tips of my windbreaker farther along the edges of my fingers, and i do not help. i think that i cannot love anything else but my soft and impregnable self.

but i do, really. somewhere flecking it all is an impenetrable love of every person, every thing. it's only that i am singularly adept at lumping all of humanity into one fleshy and quite lovable parcel; but it is quite different to wrench out of oneself a love for any particular individual. i find myself sunning in my loving a staggering assortment of facelessness, forgetting that my Humanity is made of many many singular beating hearts. singular, particular beating hearts, for whom i must wrench something out of my strawberry-and-cream, narcissistic self to love them with.