Love is inherently selfish from all angles. To love another is to build a coexistence. Your dependency on someone else’s wellbeing is destructive. Unintentionally, we build parasitic relationships and slap on a shiny title. To be loved is to change the gravitational movement of another’s life. Priorities are shifted; restrictions are set. But humans—flawed as we are—are nothing if not selfish. One day, hopefully in the distant future, the dining table will grow barren. The platters will grow cold with disuse. Holidays roll around, but there’s no one there to inhabit the space with a deck of playing cards and nauseating laughter. And suddenly the lack of love develops the momentous realization that there will never be a feeling worse than bitter emptiness. I bring you here to say I’d rather bask in my selfishness; my all-consuming greed, than feel nothing but brittle vacantness. I feel the insatiable hunger for love in my bones. When I am with the people I might call my own, I don’t feel an emotion as simple as content. I make a martyr of myself. I imagine a scenario where one day I would put my mortality as a shield to cover theirs. Does that balance out my inversion? Is my love for them interchangeable with my self-disregard? Can love be both extensively selfless, but simultaneously crudely self-deprecating?
The Bella Column 