Adapting Neruda

"Quiero hacer contigo lo que la koala hace con el árbol."

Life Lesson #11

Rescue is not romance.


[Even if it feels like it at first, it really isn't, I promise.]

A good line

Oof, those careless boys
with their broad-spectrum charms and
quick intimacies.

Idling

I have dreamt nightly of your face,
and walked the landscape of my life with the rhythms of your writing
ringing in my ears.

"Is this really the landscape of young love?" (and other hopeless questions)

I have just listened to my first ever Justin Bieber song, complete with video.

And despite having taken all the lesbian-Bieber spoofs and hair-theory with a pinch of salt, I cannot help but gape at the sheer androgyny of the whole thing. Voice, face, hair, clothing: all of it. Now, that must just be the way contemporary adolescence looks, and power to it. The more gender bending the better.

But when that face is singin' songs about gettin' and keepin' his first best girl, in a manner reminiscent of every single stale male love ballad ever, one can't help but be confused. It's not the androgyny that's bothersome, it's the fact that the meticulous confusion of gender achieved painstakingly over decades of role-resistence has, with early-onset skinny jeans, been swiftly put to the service of corporate romance.

At the end of one of his videos, Bieber and Baby step off an escalator onto this weird, deserted inside/outside plaza (a mall? a street? a set?) with a neon revolving pizzeria sign, and a Starbucks logo in the back, and I'm thinking...

This is where romance happens?

Seriously?

Irony, or some such similar narrative device.

This afternoon, I rescued a shiny, red, slightly deflated heart-shaped balloon, which had dragged itself, using its limited buoyancy, through the unmowed patch of grass in my apartment complex, past my window, to my screen door. It now rests calmly against a stack of New York Times', seemingly glad to have made it so far from Valentine's day, or any other evidence of romance.