I don't like being pessimistic. I don't like non-belief. Yet it is so intrinsic to my being, that I could not count how often I've been called 'pessimistic', 'judgemental', and so on. I think it's probably a defence mechanism; this cycle of having a bloomer mindset, people fucking me over, and my subsequent rotting in landfills has become such a natural phenomenon, that I suppose the singular truth is that I need to protect myself, psychologically. Otherwise, I would never get up out of bed, as perverse as this sounds. Everything I find pleasure in has been picked at, not by an external force but myself; I am the dilettante ice sculptor. I pick away at the cold wet slab, trying to form some shiny dolphin of renewed interest. The sun shines hot on the top deck of the cruise ship, and I assure the passengers that this dolphin will never melt; for it is forever destined to repeat the cycle of desire.

I will say that discourse is meaningless if it means that I don't have to participate in it; because I worship intellect, and always feel inadequate anyway. I will say that appearances are meaningless, because it bothers me how I look, and so I can avoid any efforts. I can say that politics is meaningless, easing me of the need to empathise, or let my guard down for one second to maybe even try. And so on, and so forth, so that I may enjoy the feelings which I get from these belief systems, as opposed to actually believing.

I think I've fucked up a lot. I've hurt a lot of people, and I'll never get to make it up to them because I convince myself that it is meaningless to do so. I think what I'm doing is similar to a lot of people out there, whether they're as self-aware as I am or not.

Maybe I should have just gone to more therapy sessions, because there, in the confines of the couches, I thought validation could save me. I had bloody hands and validation told me it was okay to have bloody hands (meta-metaphor). So, I walked around with bloody hands and convinced myself that that was okay. This was good for a while, even comfortable. But, soon the smell of rot and decay from beneath my fingernails reached my nostrils. And my eyes widened when I saw people with clean hands. Spotless hands; pure, dove-like hands that reflected the sun and blinded me. They walked around and held hands with one another. I was previously psychologically incapable of even fathoming about someone approaching my own crimson-stained claws. Yet, I craved it. Validation could not wash my hands; I had to do that lowly job myself. So I turned on the faucet and faced my drooping features in the mirror. I didn't want validation anymore; I didn't want bloody hands.

With my clean hands, the only natural thing to do was to fall in love. Like a straight-edge hippie, I was in love with life itself. I felt everything with a virgin intensity, as if I was born again. I soaked up every motion of the sun and moon, the lack of stars in the city's sky, the silhouettes of tight spaces, the blur of the train window. I lived through cycles of instant gratification, then sentiment, then motivation, and gratification again. I became jealous, and then fell in love with my jealousy. I hope you can understand and please do not think about calling up a mental institution for me.

But so, the ice sculpture remains. Passengers on the cruise; retirees, white families, even the crew, they stare at it and it morphs into many things. Their life, home, career, wife, first kiss, mistress, Lego set, Instagram influencer. The icy dolphin standing before them is love itself. And my only belief is that perhaps something as cliched as love may have some value in an otherwise meaningless, valueless life.

Forget your presuppositions about the L word. Love is undefinable objectively, and so it already has no meaning in the public sphere. One may love their partner as much as their model train set. In this way I can always hold out for the possibility of love; not so much in various forms, but in the visceral and natural repetition which it provides. I may say that a romantic partner or family or friends are useless, but this does not ever exclude love. Not just the material, either. Love for nature, self, isolation, movement, difference, spirit, sacrifice, sensation, (here I exclude morality as this is material), one's own beliefs, and the potential. Love can also be all of these things, or invoke these things; prompting us to love for love's sake, and to fall in love with love.

Contrasting this, love can be nothing at all. The prominence of nothingness should be appreciated, even loved, considering the constant murder of the senses causing neurons to fire in our small brains. In a time where the space in our brains are being farmed by technology and instantaneity, where we are merely lambs at the teat, I have fallen in love with grazing on the grass of blankness. I attempt to contact higher frequencies, staring out at the rustling pine trees, and let nothing soak through me. This is love.

Love is nothing, but everything, and so it has no defined meaning and I will never hate it. It is impossible to hate, for hate is also a kind of sick love. Hate or despair is a transcendental schizophrenic relationship with the Subject. It is an experience which we become accustomed to, otherwise we would have long transitioned to ambivalence, indifference, or purposeful forgetfulness. This is the cause of flits of outrage; our love of it.

So, my (unpremeditated) perspective is that, love is emotion itself. No other emotion exists independent of love. Love is the superclass, and all other emotions are subclasses. Typing that out was embarrassing, because technology references are kind of lame, but this was only motivated by my personal love for somewhat niche knowledge (and so I shall keep it). The circle is drawn carelessly, but nonetheless it is closed. My pessimism may be attributed to love, love for myself and my psychological state. Its acts as a protective layer against expectations which I set for myself. Although I can never truly dispel that line of people and circumstances that seek to fuck me over, at least I don't purposefully delude myself otherwise.

With every other tenet of life stained, I find that love is the only one I could come back to. It is truly something I believe in, the power of this emotion and its ability to underlie every other one. It is every good romantic's excuse for anything; creation, death, repetition. Anyone outside the 1800s may call this trite, and so be it. You are only demonstrating your love for what you perceive to be superiority in academic reasoning. And by writing this, I'm only demonstrating my love for being a strange half-assed pretend academic that should not have access to a library.