The Joke is On Me: What I Learned about Love

“I don't like love as a command, as a search. It must come to you, like a hungry cat at the door.”

 ― Charles Bukowski

I like journaling. I have been writing stuff off my mind for as long as I can remember, so it was natural for me to start a travel journal when I left home. I carried the extra weight in my handbag for years, making that soft cover, owl print notebook the most avid inanimate traveller I know. In its pages I kept track of my life as it happened on the road, in shared flats, on cheap flights and new jobs, and recorded details about new friends and old habits, rants, monologues,and the like, but I rarely looked back at any of my notes while I was away. 

When I finally came home with no definite escape plan, I was drawn to those journals like they were some kind of sustenance at a moment when I wasn't able to feed my hunger for travel. I started reading from the beginning, which was the departures hall of Buenos Aires’ airport in 2013, only to realise that the sometimes rambling, sometimes random musings were each like individual puzzle pieces. They didn't always carry much meaning or made much sense if you considered each entry individually, but they definitely fitted in squarely when put together in the bigger picture, as I was able to see now from the advantageous perspective of the omniscient reader.

I was at it one day and had already gone through two years of scribbles, when I came across a bucket list. Or part of it, at least. It looked like something I had jotted down on a whim or a rush -I thought, eyes hovering on the regrettably meagre list of three bullet points that I came up with in the early months of 2015, as a checklist of the things I wanted to do before turning thirty. I was twenty-seven years old at the time, and now, at thirty-two, I felt it was cringe-worthy. I reread it with a sense of ridicule (did I really write this?) and relief, safe in the knowledge that dignity remained unscathed, because those pages were and would be for my eyes only. 

By 2015 I had been living in Ireland for two years already and my life was well settled into a routine of calculated and almost inertial  activity, no real stress, just a lot of work and happy days in general. Such was the context for my list of clichés.

Dublin, Ireland, April 2015

By the time I’m 30 I hope to

• have set foot in every continent.
• have met someone who will prove I can actually feel like I care for a person in a way that shakes me to the core.
• look in the mirror and not see thirty.

I had no recollection of having even thought about this and I was surprised by the discovery, not to say mildly disappointed with myself. I blamed the second item on my dating history in Ireland, part of which was a string of uninspiring dates-, and then just dismissed the whole thing with a bit of a derisive hiss. But before I could turn to the next entry, the intervening years came flooding back and I couldn’t help a smile of recognition. I now had all the pieces of a particular puzzle and, in a moment of revelation, I finally understood the joke life had played on me.

While in Ireland, I lived with two very good friends of mine, and conversations about marriage and babies were never in short supply during our cozy evenings of tea and talks in the lounge. D. used to say, only half jokingly, that her hips were designed to bear the twelve children she expected to have one day, while V. had been dreaming of having babies (literally dreaming about it) ever since we had met nearly a decade before. As to me, I couldn’t  blame item number two of my bucket list on those conversations, I knew I’d watch both of them go down the aisle and baptise all their children before I’d even consider going down that road myself. They knew it too, I’d be aunty Vicky. What did hover in my mind with the elusiveness of a hummingbird, however, was the idea of love itself. I was curious, how did people even know for sure, beyond the shadow of a doubt, when they loved? I had my doubts about the kind of love I had seen so many times professed and showcased as if it was tawdry news posted in social media or bling bling jewelry worn heavily around the neck. I would not find out the truth of it in Ireland, but I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it, either. 

A year and a half later, at twenty-nine, I arrived in Australia for the first time ever. As the plane was about to land on sunny Melbourne and I saw its clear-cut shadow reflected on a green patch of land, I wondered at the experiences I’d have in a country I didn’t yet know. I expected to become familiar with hundreds of new faces and to make spontaneous trips and to live memorable moments that I couldn't yet imagine. Ireland had taught me to expect as much from life. If I had ever thought of a bucket list at all, I was certainly not thinking about it that morning of October in 2016 when the plane touched Australian ground. As I bought the ticket for the bus that would take me from the airport into the city, I felt blissfully happy being where I was in my head, in my heart and in the world. I was also certain that I had everything I needed with me -which was really just a bag with a bunch of clothes. 

Before I say anything else, a word of warning: the universe weaves every last thread of life, nothing goes unnoticed or remains unaccounted for, not even fanciful diary entries. We are to be careful with what we ask for, because thoughts brew in our heads and even in our journals (would you believe it?) like conjuring potions, and there doesn’t seem to be a more effective way of attracting something into our lives. 

The story is that by the time I turned thirty I hadn't yet got to every  continent -just to three of them, in fact-,  and the mirror mirror on the wall said something different every day, depending on how I felt; but, as life and its dry sense of humour would have it, I did get to tick off the second item on that bucket list of mine, even though at the moment of turning thirty I had no notion of its existence.

It wasn't like I was looking out for it, which is probably why I  didn’t see it coming. Love crept up on me like encroaching ivy on the early days of my Australian adventure and, by the time I realised what was going on, it was a bit too late to resist the embrace. It was then when I forcefully learnt the first thing about love: no matter how hard you may try, it can’t be rationalised. It can, however, rock you off your axis and even shift it entirely so that your life’s orbit is imperceptibly, but crucially altered in a way that makes you marvel at the sheer beauty and flinch at the odious vulnerability that come together with the intensity of it all.

Love came to me as a sort of universal key capable of solving any enigma and yet, the second thing I learnt about it was that there’s no explaining it. I became fascinated by its impossible power to bring the world to a halt in a hug, in the rippling sound of ordinary laughter, in the vague gesture of a hand. A true alchemist, this love, turning the most commonplace, less noteworthy elements of life into pure gold.

 The third thing I learnt about it, was that it’s not complaisant. Love is almost in equal parts powerful and demanding. When it visited me, it demanded that I work to bring out the best version of myself, and I obliged -or at least I tried-. In doing so I realised that the endeavour had nothing to do with love being jealous, or needy or after approval of any kind, but rather, it sprang from a very simple need to be worthy of my own feelings -if that makes any sense at all. As I worked on this, I came to the realisation that love was both a refuge and a double-edged sword.

Eventually, it stupidly reminded me of the stubborn band of the Titanic that would keep playing even in the face of disaster, while reason ran around like a headless chicken, hysterically urging them to abandon the ship. This love wasn’t the kind made to stay, and just as it had come, it left with the wind when it changed its course. After all, I had not asked for complicity or happy endings in that fateful bucket list, had I? I had asked to experience an emotion, and that wish I had been granted: it was life playing its little prank on me (ha-ha). I could see the silver lining some time afterwards, when the dust settled and I finally learnt the last and most important lesson about love: the best thing we can hope for in life is not necessarily loving someone else, but cultivating the peace of mind that stems from a profound and sincere self-love. 

The day of my thirtieth birthday in Rome with my friend Mu, somewhere around the Trevi Fountain.
I already knew life had a sense of humour, but that night I was laughing at another of its jokes.

Eventually, I did feel grateful for love’s fleeting appearance, because it taught me a few things about myself. You live and learn, they say, so take it from me and be careful with any wishful thinking, especially if you’re writing it down, because it lingers on and life’s a cheeky monkey, it may catch you unawares.