No utility in falling. And that's that.

When will I learn? People are not characters in books. They do not say the things that make you re-read sentences one thousand times in quick succession. Life is not structured like a story. Falling in love is not as pleasurable a state as it seems in the movie houses. Things don't just...work out. Or end well. Or resolve.

After all, "the life of man is solitary, nasty, brutish, and short." -T. Hobbes

And reading novels can ruin you. Getting ensnared by them makes you unfit for any sort of living-living.

When Bessie Head wrote "Nothing can be right until a man and a woman make all things meaningful through each other," she must've been inside one of those bouts of insanity people think she was prone to. It's a nice idea, but, in the end, it's just that we've all been socialized to think that it is possible. So, at every which opportunity we can, we piece together this makeshift mockery of that ideal as though it is in our actual lives. As though it could be possible. Attainable, you know.

Wait. Let me stop being all melodramatic. Let me turn down my feminist angst. But there's just one more thing.

I really do believe that the heart knows when it finds its home. Or whatever. I really can't shake that love can make you all right. I didn't think I wanted too much. One day, I just wanted to come home and have everything be all right because I was inside this little cocoon we had made. Where when we close the front door to our little house, we play Scrabble and argue about political ideology, women's so-called liberation, men's so-called cheating hearts, eat too much pasta and bacon, read the Quran, read the Bible, tell really stupid inside jokes, do impressions of one another, ruin our eyes by reading too much, snore in synchrony. And just before that, try to make the world's smartest, big-headed, brown babies. Me. That's right. Wanting brown babies.

Guess I'm like every other woman who ever breathed breath. Wanting to make a miracle with the man to whom she gave over the deed to her heart.

Voluntarily. Though quaking, perhaps a-tremble. Still.

Once you learn, though, once you see what's really there, what else can you do? There's nothing for it but to "go without fear."