life.love.regret.

Something from a fellow old soul tonight-and my first guest post.  He captures poignant love and the hurt of losing it with a simple elegance, and without killing any marines.  Thank you James, for sharing this with me and for let me in turn share it with others. 


Before I get started, that's a particularly concise and evocative phrase. Good job, Unbroken.

Three words that have turned out to be a fairly popular t-shirt, if you think of the hardcore punk community as a runway. But those three words have quite a bit attached to them. life.love.regret, perhaps foremost, is a mid-90's genre defining record by San Diego straight edge band Unbroken. Suffice to say they were loud, heavy and wrote songs that turned mosh pits turn into hospital visits. Much more would bore you with description. Tellingly, Unbroken did a cover of Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart.

Now you know what the t-shirt stands for, but I think that phrase is wrong and myopic at best and straight up lying at worst.  The kids who wear the Unbroken t-shirts, are not, at the time of wearing the t-shirt, historically known for being happily married.  In other words, life.love.regret skews young and I'm writing it with us in mind.

Here's the thing. life.love.regret. as a sentence clearly articulates a mindset, that you will live, you will love someone and what comes after that love are regrets, piling all the things you should have done in hindsight on top of you, like a blanket.

That feeling of loss is what life.love.regret speaks so vividly and absolutely about. Maybe loss isn't the right word. The more I think about it, what's more precise or less wrong than loss is the word unpublished. The knowledge that there are feelings and expressions and emotions that can't or shouldn't be accessed anymore. There was something there, but now it's not and instead there is only a conspicuous absence, or a blank spot in the shape of where he/she/they/whomever curled up next to you or said something that triggered your dopamine receptors or however it is that science works and that swelling, headswimming feeling inside you happens and you realize you love them, that's











gone.


life.love.regret is about that. It's memorializing that feeling. Perhaps even worse, enshrining it. Sure, there is haunting and passionate art that comes from that pain, it's powerful, after all. It's also universal. In the previous paragraph, I'm not talking about anything you as a human being haven't already experienced. If you live long enough, this will happen to you. There will be almost primeval volumes of it. It will intoxicate you.

If it hasn't happened already, I can only promise you that it will. And I'm sorry.  But more than that?  You will lie in places where you wouldn't stand, to quote Planes Mistaken For Stars, a band that covered Unbroken.  You might even do worse things afterwards. You'll make mistakes and those will be tragic, stupid or any combination between the two. That loss is rough and in trying to fill that explicitly, you'll fail.

And the loss will not fade, not if you're thinking about it that way, which makes it a dramatic thing to put on a t-shirt.

But if you don't think about it like that? More things happen to you. And as the more things that happen transpire and more yarn is added to the sweater of your life, the less central the loss gets. In 2008, I had my head fucked with, brutally, by people that were trying to protect themselves. That sounds big but it just means the relationships got bad, it got too heavy and they bowed out in ways that were not graceful. Unsurprisingly, alcohol was a lubricant.

I spent a couple months of spring 2009 dealing with the psychic fallout. It was the first time something of that magnitude happened to me. It devastated me at the time, but since then, I've been talking easily about it like ancient history, war stories from a magical time before Twilight, when the conclusion of Harry Potter was the widest collective supernatural event in our recent memory.

That's what life.love.regret. misses. Your life continues, if you let it. Yeah, being discarded with the rapidity and purpose of a filled condom suuuuuucked and was one of those "defining" moments, but you know what else was a defining moment? Getting drunk in November 2010 with the guy who writes Uncanny X-Men. That pain and turbulence from 2008 and 2009 are hilarious stories at this moment. It's not like those stories are any less important or that pain was any less real, but that distance heals quite a bit because I chose not to make those things or those people central in my life.nny

Put simply, life.love.regret. by virtue of its period, dramatically ends the thought. Put even simpler: life.love.regret. means regret is the last thing. Regret is what you're left with. That's not really the end, is it? You must go on. You must keep living. After all, there are classes or you are scheduled for work in the morning. All things pass in the microscopic skirmishes of our daily lives.

And that's good! As amazing as being in love, wrapped up in lust and losing consciousness exhausted in their arms is, the feeling will happen again with a different person. This love is not the final love. True, tomorrow isn't promised and one ought to live accordingly, but live is the important verb there.

Sharks must move forward to keep feeding and the truism's apt. To keep living, and truly, sincerely, living, the forward momentum that life.love.regret. inhibits is crucial.



Thanks, Emily for the space and the platform. I've wanted to write this for years and only knew it a couple weeks ago.