As long as you come back to me, I will never ask... in anticlimatic

…for you I will be, the man in the iron mask.

Stumbled into this incredible love song by Billy Bragg the other day via Spotify, and I can’t stop listening to it on a loop.

There’s black comedy’s, and there’s black love songs. And one of the fascinating things about love, I think, is how fundamental it is. It’s below the place where things can skew off and become toxic. So at least half, or more, of the love songs I find myself really appreciating, are ones about the more toxic aspects of it.

Because we have all suffered those likely more than we’ve enjoyed the purer aspects. And hearing other people experience the same, makes them easier to bear.

“The Man In The Iron Mask” is about a man who is so infatuated with a woman that he will wait for her, even when she is knowingly out with other men, even though it’s torture. I found myself in this position back in 2017 or so, living with a girl who went through a lot of trouble to convince me that she was The One to the point where I started to believe her- which is when she would disappear in the middle of the night for weeks at a time, and lie about where she had been.

It takes work to reduce your self esteem and self worth to a level required to put up with that, and it was work I had unfortunately put in. The experience of pursuing a mate for life, for some- people like me at least, a bit of an outlier in most aspects- is one of repeatedly getting your hopes up only for Life to dash them to bits while daring you to collect the pieces and try again.

Being “different” is punishing in a number of ways where that is concerned, but in the long run there is a perk to that aspect that eventually sets a person apart from others- knowing yourself. It’s much harder to know yourself when you’re normal enough that pre-scripted roles suit you well enough to avoid the conflict tensions and challenges that come from having to reconcile your nature with a world inherently hostile to it.

It’s the conflict that educates us about us, I think. We have to know ourselves, and the world in which we live, in order to conduct any sort of winnable battle with it- for the sake of preserving, to the best of our ability, our own unique souls. People who just slide into easy roles they wish was them, or even roles they think are them, often end up angry without knowing why it seems. They can literally have it all, and still find no escape from anger over seemingly nothing. Because they have no idea who they are, and therefore no idea what to want.

Eventually the girl didn’t come back. Which I was mostly prepared for, so I can’t report much heartbreak there, except in the usual getting my hopes up and then having to collect the pieces of them afterwards.

You can’t hate someone without loving them too. I’ve always thought hate was a type of love, the way tomatoes are a type of fruit. You can’t really hate someone unless there is a love there too- some obsessive binding connection.

A relationship we can have with ourselves as well.