The idyll & the maelstrom

Everyone wants to live in the idyll.

I get it. Who wouldn't? No responsibilities or cold hard realities. An endless string of cozy nights. Warmth. Safety. Affection. Comfort. Peace. True romantics at heart drape the idyll over everything, believing that love conquers the day. It's an attractive notion. No matter what happens, as long as you have each other, everything will be all right.

Some people need the idyll like food and water. Some convince themselves that they can live there forever, and take their loved ones with them. As long as one person believes in it, that should be enough. Love will prevail. That's it's whole point.

And then, much like the Upside Down, you have the maelstrom. The realities of existence, like hungry dogs after meat, are always salivating at the doors to the idyll, panting to get in. Any sane person wouldn't want to be there. Any sane person would hide in the idyll forever. A true romantic lets nothing get in the way of it.

But for those more pragmatic, the maelstrom may be a shitshow, but it's there. Ignoring it will only make the winds blow harder. It's cold out there. It's terrifying. It's rent and car notes and the brakes are going out and I don't have money for both me and my dog to eat. It's the endless minutiae of each Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. It breeds anxiety and terror and nights lying awake, wondering how your life is going to look in a few hours, a few days, a few weeks. If the car goes out, if you're scraping together change for a goddamn can of spaghetti-o's, when your paycheck is gone the day after it posts, when your credit cards are screaming from the strain. It’s not personal drama or heartache or the singular bullshit that happens to everyone. The maelstrom doesn’t give one hot fuck about that. Surviving that stuff is just a little ’fuck you’ cherry on top of a very ugly sundae. It’s the practicalities in life that will ruin you if you don’t keep eyes on them, and if you don’t, well, getting your heart broken or losing a friend will look like a fucking luxury. They are luxuries.

The idyll stops being a place of respite and becomes a very expensive fantasy. How can anyone live there when the maelstrom just gets worse and worse outside? How can one live in there 24/7? You simply can't afford it, and when you finally step out into the storm, it's lonely, because you're the only one out there. There's no one to lean on or commiserate with, no one to comprehend the bone deep terror in your gut, no one to help you balance the fear because they have no idea what the hell it's like. You spend all of your time and energy trying to hold this hurricane in the palm of your hand, and you begin to resent having to be out there alone. When you duck your head back into the idyll, you have no one to talk to about the maelstrom, even if they do their best to try and understand. Love is the best medicine, they say. Just love me and I'll love you and all will be well, but what world do you live in, man? If you want love, you can't just cherry pick the parts you want out of it. It's the whole enchilada. Love is the private party happening in a basement below a very cold and lonely street-you need the keys and several passwords to get in, and no one gets them without a few years in the slum. That is, if the slum doesn't rid you of the desire altogether.

Love may be grand, but it's not enough. You cannot grow if you're stuck in a fantasy. You may want to keep the true romantic inside of you untouched, like the last vestiges of childhood, but you cannot keep someone safe if they're out there in the shit and you can't face stepping outside to brave it with them. Love is more than cozy nights. Love is stepping out there together in the storm and knowing that weathering it together is the only true passport to a happy, if momentary idyll, which is ten times more beautiful when you walk into it, drenched from outside, with someone drenched right next to you, where you can both laugh and cry about it and know you're not describing an alien landscape. Love is not enough.

If only it were. But even still-

it'd be so easy to destroy.