On Love

**Trigger Warning**

**Foul language**

**birth and mortality**

**boring shit**

Guys fuck girls fuck guys in real life. Or so I have heard. I kind of missed that part.

I hope you don’t.

Don’t take my word for it kid. That is kind of how all, ok not all, most of the dickheads and cunts walking about in the world around you came to be.

Yeah. I think I got that right. Wait. Let me see. Yeah. I think so. Most everyone I know I guess at least.

But then science! Yeah, science is a miracle.

Then there is this thing called love.

At some point in your life, you’ll hopefully go, what the fuck is happening in this world. And that is when we, your mom, I, granddads, grandmoms and all kinds of fucking relatives will crawl out of the woodwork with their explanations. Don’t give two fucks about us. Most of us are just bored assholes and screwups waiting around to die.

Don’t take our word about how much awesome fun we had when we were your age etc. I am sitting here watching us and I am telling you I’d rather watch glaciers melt. Huge motherfucking glaciers. Over decades and years.

That is just the tip of the iceberg.

I suspect the whole lot are on WhatsApp groups, 2017, forwarding fucking mind numbing shit around and backslapping the next inanity. Really. I am sure all of them are dealing with some or the other shit, but that doesn’t make us experts in Life nor Love. It just means we are fucking dealing with shit.

Not even experts at that.

Just lousy two beat pairs of humans.

To be honest, some do look like they might have had some fun sometime in their life. Ok, scratch that. No. I don’t think that is true.

I swear I get the feeling your grandmoms and granddads are just putting up with each other waiting for the other to knock off pretty soon so that they get some respite. All the while praying they don’t get cancer themselves. I can practically taste the distaste in their eyes. It is funny to watch. And scary as fuck.

We are the ones you want to get advice from about life and love.

You know I think we are confusing love and marriage. I am kind of hoping you stick it to the society and become successful and define what kind of union you want to be in. There is this whole LGBTQ movement happening. I mean, it’s ok. But instead of dismantling the institution of marriage they are trying to fucking climb onto the deathtrap.

Numbskulls or what?

Right, numbskulls.

Can I take a drag on the cigarette? A long slow drag. It is bad and likely to give me cancer.But then my friend has stage 4 cancer and he is a bloody teetotaller. Irony eh? I think I’ve been smoking on and off, mostly off and intensely on, for around 2 decades now.

That is a lot of cigarettes.

Or as I like to think, a lot of thoughts, all exactly three inches long.

Coming back to the topic of life, I think one of your uncles kinda nailed it. He is just plain drunk most of the time. I mean, I feel for him. I doubt he has ever so much as seen a cunt before. He does go to the temple somewhere once a month. The whole fucking gang goes I think. Insane. Kind of reminds me of ants crawling and feeling other ants with their antennae, making their way to a rotten fruit basket.

I used to go too. To the temple I mean. For 15 or 16 years regularly. Like clockwork. Then one day I think God said, fucker, be an atheist. Well, so I stuck it up to the men and women in the family and said I had better stuff to do. Honestly, it has freed up a whole lot of time and energy for me.

That probably doesn’t mean we never fell in our versions of love. No one is qualified to tell another person what love is. None of us have that right. I am not even sure love exists outside of one’s mind. The minute it goes out of the body and transforms into actions and fucking and words and gestures it dissipates. It cliches out. It becomes roses and appointments and traffic and chores and waiting around and just vanishes into thin air. Ask someone why they love someone and invariably it will be mundane.

Or maybe not.

Maybe it is an accumulation of small acts. I am not very convinced, but I sure have seen some very convinced people. Till they all run straight into the brick wall of life.

Yesterday your mom and I were wondering what kind of parents we will turn out to be to you.  Won’t it be grand if we can predict it? Supremely grand.

Standing in the middle of a basketball court at night, in faraway Brooklyn, under the summer halogen lights, the humid air weighing your 9-month pregnant mom down, me holding her hands, watching a bunch of kids smoking weed and playing ball, one of us couldn’t make out the future.

You were there too. Just a placenta away. We did curse you a couple of times. Lovingly. “Fucking kid cozy inside” we sniggered to each other. Not wanting to come out. But you were there. So I guess it was all three of us there.

Through the window from the park, we could see the bedroom of our rented place. We could see our ridiculously high bed.

Love was just an excuse, like with so many other things. But it is never too late. That is the beauty of it. It fucking teases you from around the corner. It dances into your arms just when you thought it was gone forever. It pulls back and peeks around the corner again.

Time to walk again. Walk round and round the corner. While we wait. For you to grow. For us to grow with you.

Many times I have been told I can’t know love even if it hit me in my face with a bloody spade. Well, all those who told me this were sad pieces of shits themselves who were reincarnated penguins on an ice floe. But they look happy at times.

What would I know? I’m yet to take the corner.

Just remember, never take our advice.