rash - excelsior's last publication

Life has left me with little other than uncertainty. I appreciate my perceptions but I almost never feel that I can trust them and I have a hard time making really important decisions based on them. (I used the word "I" four times in that sentence and twice in this parenthetical.)

I think a person can consider themselves lucky if they can be sure about one or two things in a lifetime.

For almost four years, I have been sure about something.

I've done a lot over the course of that time to dissuade myself of that apparent certainty. I've done, perhaps, more to dissuade the other person who I believe is certain of the same thing. I owe a lot to a lot of people who have helped me improve and build on myself and grow to..... love myself. Not because of anything good or likable about myself but because I am alive and I have the gift of being able to express that life to others. I owe the most to the person who got me to really believe in love as a concept again in the first place.

When I say "love" here, in the last sentence and in this following paragraph, I'm not talking about love like one has for oneself or friends or family or pets or subjects or activities. I am talking about romantic love. I am talking about the same thing that Kierkegaard and the other existentialists who blew my mind were talking about and trying to debunk (or, perhaps, prove). I am talking about the kind of love that seems to defy Charles Darwin's rules of natural selection. I am talking about unconditional and passionate love.

Romance is spit upon, dismissed as archaic, even as misogynistic. Love, being the only word we English speaking people have to express the most intimate connection between two living things, is a cliché. Even speaking about it in this way is probably deeply ironic.

I don't care about all the words that have been attached to 'love' and devalued it as a result. I want to reset the meanings of the words that we have and get people to rethink them. The history of the English language is not acceptable to me while the words are far, far more than acceptable.

If it takes me the rest of my life, I am going to make love mean something to people, most particularly one person.

Love is the green light I have followed my entire life. I want our generation to be able to believe in it as I do. I know that my belief in it will be challenged and perhaps knocked flat. But I am a person of faith and will keep building the belief up, again and again, because I am committed to it.

I will show you how committed I am.

One love.