Pain & Love

After ETG performed VOLUME 2: LOVE at the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, I thought a great deal about pain and love. (For those of you who missed our fantastic short form piece, you can see it online here.) This led me to remember a short story I wrote about a man I loved who hurt me deeply. It was all about pain, but emotional pain. I think I should have known the relationship was going down hill when I started writing pieces about physical pain. Yet, I wouldn't give back any of those ache-filled days because they were also filled with so much love. It was a messy, awful love, but love all the same. Loving him changed me. To this day I am still not sure I'm okay with that.

I think love also brings up issues of mortality. I find it fitting that so many plays, such as LOVE, or Shakespeare, or Sartre, merge love and death. When we are in the beginning stages of a really crazy, intense love, well, we sort of die, I think. We lose a part of ourselves. And that's scary. And there is so much fear in that love, because we worry about what happens to the other person if they die or, more selfishly, what happens to us when they "die" or leave us. Maybe love doesn't always hold up a clear mirror, but in the end it always makes us confront truths about ourselves we don't want to see. And that hurts like hell.

Anyway, this wasn't just me shamelessly plugging some of my writing. I just wanted to share.