There is perhaps, nothing more frustrating than being unable to deliver a piece-of-mind in a very precise manner. And I don’t merely speak of telling someone else a story, or an information, which they may have hard times in understanding the context. I believe what is even more difficult is to communicate an understanding, a comprehension, a vision.
It is often a desperate pursuit, at the end of the day, you are only successful in transferring to someone else a fragment of your thought. And it may lead to misunderstanding, or backlash, or downright rejection where the partiality of their integration of your thought is to blame.
And this happens all the time, often not because they are intellectually incapable, or less engaging emotionally, but because there is this un-bridgable gap. Normally communication is only capable of facilitating the passing of simpler ideas, of concrete concepts, but when it comes to a full and intact biased perspective, it requires a certain leap, a jump, a process in which some of the details would unfortunately be left behind unable to find itself reaching the receiving end.
Just like those times where saying “I love you” is just not enough anymore. When the word “love” is too simplistic to fully explain what we really experience. Or when you don’t have the right word to tell someone who is mad at you that you didn’t mean it that way.
I have always lamented at how apparently no one really understand how I think—how the world appears from my perspective. But after meeting Selvi I started to realize, it is not really because I haven’t found someone whom I can share it with, but because of our own limitation to really experience the bias of others, despite she or he being the closest person to us.
I often tell her that I see colors from time to time, that in my rapid but very random and decentralized mental processing, it’s like I can see a pattern, so abstract I cannot reproduce into something else more concrete. The best I can convert them is into words. And because of that I have always envy her . . . And I think sometimes love can originate from envy; that she has always been good at artistic reproduction: into colors, into drawings, into songs, into photographs.
Me? I can only put them into words. I may call myself a poet, but sometimes poetry is my half-ass excuse at being unable to replicate the exact manure of my mind. No praises for my writings can ever console me enough for my failure of creating a feasible or satisfying reproduction. And where transcendence and metaphysical consolations have failed, there appears to be barren wilderness where remaining solutions are scarce.
But the true journey of relationship is arriving at the realization that not every understanding can be mutually shared. Some are of unique encoding, exclusive to a person, and not even your partner can quite grasp your vast methodical imaginations or your excessive sentimentality.
Still . . . why would it matter? The lament on my face, the worries in her expression are more than enough happy signs. That each of us care for each other, that we are desperately sorry for ourselves and all our limitations, for being unable to dive into the depth of thought that replicates the mind of our lovers.
As long as we try our best to put on our virtual glasses to experience the life of our dearest. That’s it, while we can’t really live the thought of their head, our appreciation can find its farthest extent in trying to put ourselves in others’ shoes. In their condition.
Because in every polite plead to request an understanding, in every desperate cry of lovers who want to be understood, for strangers who want to be acknowledged, for children who want to be noticed by the parents, for greenhorns yearning for recognition, we are all holding the same thing by the tip of our tongues:
“Please simulate mine, would you?”
That is, the desire for the most basic need of our being: understanding.
JC
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