A Collection of Short Stories and Poems

Loving to Love

~Hello. It's been a little bit, I suppose. I haven't been writing a lot lately in exchange for drawing more. I even started a new artbook on here because I actually ran out of room in the first one. I'd like to give a little bit of background for this prompt, so please bear with me. I was in a WR-121 class for my last term in my first year at Oregon State University. We have a little thing called The Exchange in which students submit their manuscripts to the school's newspaper to be published. Few kids get to pass into the final stages of the manuscript process for publishing, but I have somehow managed to move into the next step. Though this is not officially published or guaranteed to be published, it's still exciting because I didn't honestly think it was great enough for this. The overall prompt is as follows: Relevant and compelling to the audiences of OSU; Rhetorically savvy in its use of language, tone, and style, and aligned with the target audiences; Focused in scope and size, typically ranging between 300 and 600 words. Keeping it under 600 words was really difficult for me because I had a lot to say about this, so it may read as kind of vague. I decided to write about the abuse of the word 'Love' because I know people in college are worrying over words and how to use them as well as love in general since you're thinking about new people you've met and how you feel about them. Love is a powerful word and I enjoy using it a lot because I want to use it often since I have so much love to give my friends. ANyways, this is getting too long. Just know that this is my original piece for a class in which I might get published for realsies. So, please, please, PLEASE, refrain from using any part of this unless otherwise okayed by ME because it could ruin a lot of things for me. Thank you for your care. Please enjoy.~

    Many things have upset me lately. Many of those things are subjects that don't matter like the chipping of my favourite nail polish or the boyish feathering of my hair when the wind blows too hard; however, there are deeper, scarier things I'm too ashamed to think about because of the petty nature of why it upsets me or simply because it hurts so much that my brain is too simple to comprehend. The fact that human language is so limited by words, however, is something that upsets me a great deal, as it should upset many of us looking for words to abuse in a research paper or essay.

    What is the word 'blue' to a blind person? What is the word 'comfort' to someone that only knows pain? I've recently had a wake-up call that made me really see the problem with how limited language is when it comes to the ancient and primal idea of feelings or emotions; why are some of them so difficult to articulate after all these years of human evolution? That call is what's been happening with my grandmother. The fact that she's suffering and terrified of what's happening to her twists the strings of my heart into a knot. There are so few words in the English language that can express the amount of love I want her to know. I want to soothe the chaos that plagues her mind. It's a tragedy.

   We humans, particularly those who speak only English, abuse the word "Love" so often within the span of a day that it hurts my chest how useless the word has become. Teenagers use it most often to describe the joy food or materials bring us. We also use it to tell the people we care for most how we really feel about them. Shouldn't that be insulting? That we can use the single most powerful word in our language to describe both material joy and overwhelming feelings of attachment we have with certain people? What gives us the gull to equate precious human life to that of things that won't even matter to us in a month or so? In German and Japanese, at least, there are different words to describe different types of love felt towards certain things such as the following: Dein ist mein ganzes Herz which means "your's is my heart alone" or hab' dich lieb which roughly means "love you lots". I still don't think any words are sufficient enough to really convey what it means to truly love or bond with those around us. Younger people like those here at OSU have a tendency to overuse 'love' because of the trend to say 'love' at any chance we get, whether that be to our dearest friends or our favourite cartoon character. 

   Life is a wonderful thing -- and, mind you, it's rare that I ever think about admitting that given I'm known for letting the phrase "I hate living" slip from my lungs more times than I'd care to talk about -- and I do love living when I'm with people that make it a little less miserable in this world. It's difficult spending the little time we humans have on this little blue marble fumbling for the perfect words. It's too great a privilege to be where we as OSU students are and not have the capacity to truly convey what it is to love. It's such a waste that we love too much for our own good and yet too little to understand our feelings.