strings attached

flipping through the pre-programmed radio stations in my car tonight on the way home from the grocery store, my ears were drawn to a song on one of the poppier stations on my dial. it had a nice guitar part and the singer's voice had a pinch of talent -- rare things for pop radio these days. i began listening to the lyrics and it was something pitifully trite, of the sort "i can't live without you..." (seriously, it was something like "I look at her, but she doesn't know how I feel about her...") and it hit me that love is and is not like this. or rather, it can be, but it doesn't have to be. you can (and do sometimes) let yourself get all worked up over that girl who won't return your affection, or you can move on (and probably don't often or soon enough) to someone more attentive to your attention.

and i'd just like to say here that it's not like i expected love to be just like the pop songs on the radio make it out to be. there is some verity to them -- that's why they're at all popular (marketing ploys aside). you don't hear too many songs about gastric colitis or what to do with your second billion dollars earned from your dot com start-up in part because these don't define a common human experience shared by a significant portion of the population. but love and heartache and heartbreak are such a common ground, and so we peons can relate to the ordeal we imagine to be at the root of our pop stars' emotive love songs. but not having had a genuine experience with love until i was well into my 20's, i had some misconceptions (and here hollywood is probably to blame as well) about how it was supposed to be, how i was supposed to feel, and how he was supposed to react.

i've since learned (since the end of my total naivety about 2 years ago now) that love is a complicated, complex beast. it's as if you have thousands of tiny strings attached to you; these strings are fine and transparent, like the strings attached to a marionnette. but they are also attached to others -- those you encounter in the game of love -- and you get pulled in so many different directions by different people at different times, or by only one person, or by several people at once. similarly, you are pulling on other people's strings. sometimes it is without you knowing it, other time you are intentionally tugging at their strings. it's a tug-of-war, and you win when you find a string being pulled equally and strongly in the opposite direction.

i used to get quite worked up about being pulled about; i was like a floppy, spineless rag doll, who let herself get yanked in the direction of whichever string happened to be taut at the moment. further, i used to be stressed about pulling others' string unintentionally, or that i had any power whatsoever over others' strings. now i accept my strings: that i am pulled, that i pull. and i've learned to control the pulling to some degree. it's kinda fun sometimes to get yanked into a brief free-fall, or to see how hard you have to tug to get the other person to notice. i don't get too upset over strings that break or pulls that go unnoticed or strings you can't quite get a good grip on. que sera sera. it's all for fun, until that tug of fate comes along...

because afterall, they're just strings. they're not a part of me, who i am. sometimes it hurts when the strings break, but they don't damage or alter the essence of the attached marionnete puppet. and i am that marionette puppet. except with a sturdy spine and no-strings-attached independently functioning legs which can kick the shit out of (or at least run away from) any self-proclaimed pupeteer who thinks he can play with my heartstrings. kinda like pinnochio. except i'm cuter and you can't tell when i'm lying.