22nd
Variations on a Romantic History
From drunken conversations comes self-analysis and something that looks a bit like self-understanding.
Let’s begin with the pseudo-poetic:
My romantic life is a series of meaningful almosts and meaningless weres.
It’s full of implication and vagueness; those “almosts” and “weres” encompass many possible meanings. But it feels maladroitly poeticized, a sentiment stuffed poorly into a form that doesn’t quite fit it.
Let’s try the vernacular declarative instead:
I hook up with the girls I don’t care about and fuck up with the girls I do.
Here we get concreteness (“hook up”) but still preserve some of the necessary vagueness (“fuck up”). Though the sentiment is expressed simply and matter-of-factly, there’s a stately elegance in its parallel slang. Nonetheless, it feels too declarative, and we’re looking for something with a bit more transparent emotion.
How about this?
I fuck the ones who mean nothing and fuck up with the ones who mean everything.
Here we preserve the parallel structure but do away with its balance in favor of concatenation, building from “fuck” to “fuck up.” Though each clause seems to express a distinct phenomenon, the separation implied by the “and” thus belies a deeper connection between the two. Moreover, because we build as we progress through this sentence, we place more weight on the latter sentiment, making it the one that truly matters. The vulgar harshness of the initial “fuck” suggests both inner turbulence and a stoic male veneer while also lending some physicality and actualized pain to the act of “fucking up.” The sentence struggles for poesy, its stark contrast between “nothing” and “everything” gesturing toward chiaroscuro, but its profane verbs ensure that the entire enterprise remains debased and leaves our speaker both hopeless and self-hating. It thus achieves the most of the three formulations, but it is also the most uncomfortable to say.
Regardless, we have three good options at our disposal. Their historical accuracy is marginal at best, but I like these sentences, and the facts can be molded accordingly.
