A Romantic Notion.

[PleasureToBurn]

This may sound weird, but just bear with me.

There was a woman I loved very much. We're no longer together. But I remember everything about her, everything about falling in love with her. Every moment like the hand of God stopping time for us. That alluring energy. The promising unknown. Our personalities circled each other like binary stars as we fell deeper in love with one another. It was a special moment in time.

And then I got thinking about time travel. And t

he more I think about time travel, the physics and theoretical aspects of it, if it exists, I think it's a very romantic notion. Multi-universes. She was the woman I thought I'd end up with, grow old with, share the best moments of my life with. All love is like that, but what is memory. It's not really how it was, it's how you remembered it. And she remembered it differently. But those moments, they seemed to stand still. The fact that there could be some hidden place in time, somewhere in the universe where that is endless, where things didn't happen how they happened. Someplace where we're always falling in love, always young, always new lovers.

I've heard nihilistic notions that nothing in this life matters, or that we just repeat shit from past lives, the same problems in an endless loop, like a hell you can't escape. If that is true, why not an endless loop of those best moments. Quantum physics has brought forth the idea of multi universes, and if one could transverse these universes, wouldn't it be a form of time travel?

To think that there could be, in the endless possibilities of universes, a hidden place in time where we are always falling in love, before everything that would happen happened to us, that place where we're eternally beautiful, a love beyond space, beyond time, an endless loving, a romance that is forever.

[Animal]

This is beautiful. I haven't had a chance to respond properly yet but I wanted you to know I'm percolating and I will. Thank you for sharing.

[Animal]

PleasureToBurn Have you seen the movie "Mr. Nobody?" I had just seen it recently before you posted this topic, but I've been swamped with work and haven't had time to pay real attention to something as deep and thoughtful as this, and give it the kind of feedback I feel it deserves.

Mr. Nobody deals with the 'what ifs' and it is presented kind of like a dream. There's a point where a boy is on a train track and has to make a decision, and his entire life plays out before him... that is, a few different possible lives. But the loop keeps playing where he ends up with this one woman, over and over and over.... as if for eternity. I would be very curious to hear your thoughts on it. I started a thread about it here, but I haven't had time to even contribute to it.

It has a dream-within-a-dream quality. The trailer, with all its intrigue, doesnt do it justice.

[Animal]

On a more personal note, your post also reminds me of something that just popped out of me when I met my husband for the very first time. I was a regular poster on personality cafe, and I got in an argument with someone and my future husband popped up out of nowhere and wrote a very heartfelt post, directed at me. He was a quiet poster and I had never seen him before. I was too nervous to answer him yet, so I wrote something short telling him I'd be back. After a few days, any time I read his post I still felt like, how can I impress someone so impressive? I liked him without knowing a thing about what he looked like or who he was, I just sensed it. I still had nothing just right to say, but I wanted to keep him hooked and just wrote this from nowhere:

I didn't know where this came from, it just came out as if from the aether. The language is a bit rigid, showing that I was nervously trying to impress him, but the content ... just happened. In retrospect, it was me reconciling the things from my past that haunt me, with the sense that I can now transform these to tools and move forward, rather than being stuck on a loop with my past and my first love...

I had been obsessive about music since I was 4, and had a music career by 13. At 16, I got struck with a serious illness that almost killed me. Six months later I could get out of bed (with difficulty) and was improving, but the illness left me speaking in a whisper permanently. This is when my ex started coming to my house with a mutual friend to help me out. He pursued me for several months, doted on me with the illness, until we began dating. We were madly in love, but broke up in tremendous heartache after a year. We were both traumatized. Although I refused to be his 'girlfriend' unless he quit drinking, we saw each other on and off until I lied and said I didn't love him anymore, so I could release him to go live his life (he was staying local just for me). Over the years he kept coming back to town and trying to marry me, but it was impossible given our circumstance and state of mind. It killed me.

Meanwhile I lived for 18 years playing this 1 year of my life on repeat, constantly trying to recapture it. I also chased the feelings that I had once gotten from music, which were pure, innocent... I loved music in the most natural and dedicated way, unobstructed by insecurity or self-consciousness. It just was what it was; pure beauty. I have always been a serious, too-intense person, but music and disciplining myself to perform it had been my salvation, my path to God. (I was an atheist back then, but this is essentially how I saw it.) In losing both my voice and my first love, the purest feelings and experiences I ever had were ripped out straight from my gut and I was left dehumanized, dependent and purposeless, nothing but an Animal. I could desire and consume, but the love in my heart was gone.

Around age 20, a vision of a fantasy trilogy came to me. The male hero was inspired by my ex, the antagonist my close friend, and the female protagonist was some vision of innocence, though she was not much like me. She played piano for the love of it, took major risks to do so in her society, etc. I drafted it. I was a terrible writer, and this project was way beyond my scope, but I knew someday, when I was ready to face these trials, it would be transformed into my magnum opus. It would capture my feelings about the past and transformed them, cathartically freeing my spirit, while also providing an avenue to share my insights and passions with the world. But for now, it was just another way to hang on to memories that were long gone.

My past became a beacon of long lost glory, and in the present, I was living in exile. It's as though I was living in the past on a loop - writing books and music that recaptured these sentiments. I did have other relationships and obsessions, one very intense which dug straight to my soul - but, although I did care for him as a human, I also knew deep down that my intense DRAW to him was about him being a symbol to me. He was the musician I once was and could have been. I always chased present goals and was diligent, but in capturing these glimpses of the past, I came ALIVE.

Meanwhile I was still writing songs because I couldn't help it, but my whispery voice sounded terrible. It came to me one day that my name as a musician now would be Erosian Exile. I learned to harness my whispery voice so I could sing my songs a little better, even if inadequately. I recorded one album and sang through my whisper. Also lead a band. I knew this would not last but I grabbed it while I was healthy enough to do so, and I felt as though my innocence was reborn from the ashes. To me, innocence is the pure love of music, the feeling of baring my soul into the song whether I'm alone or on stage, the purity of honest and soulful expression that I harnessed after years of practice and nurtured with tremendous care. I also had to accept that this would not last, but I was able to accept that and trust that when the period of better health was over, I would throw myself into my fantasy trilogy. I lacked any writing talent, but knowing that I pursued what was left of my voice with such vigor, I felt more equipped to find ways to assert my will despite the illness. So I began practicing and by now I've put in way more than my 10 thousand hours of writing. The trilogy is coming along.

I wrote two other albums over the years, but health caught up to me and now even the whispery voice is unusable. So I'm hoping for another miracle, but I accept that it won't happen now, and might never happen. I'm more invested in my trilogy in the moment, which is remarkable to me, even though the past still gnaws at me sometimes.

As for the ex...
... let's fastfoward to 2014, when I saw a post written by my future husband Daeva on a forum. I did not consciously know he was my soulmate but there was something going on deep inside, which must have spurred that post about memories, which came from the aether. About a month after that very short and unfinished exchange, I had a strong impulse to contact my ex, and something drove me to do it.

I am not usually so impulsive when it comes to contacting important people. Just before this, when I contacted another friend who I was close with during the dark years of the past (he was the inspiration for the antagonist in the trilogy!). Due to things this memory scraped up inside myself, it took me a long time, lots of thinking and preparing and self-work, before I contacted him to discuss such things. This is my more typical behavior. But my ex, I was not planning to contact. Yet the impulse came on and within 2 days I dug up some phone number on an old phone that barely turned on anymore, and there he was, far away, but on the phone!! 18 years after breakup, he still loved and cared for me too. He still missed me. But we both knew our life circumstance and dreams would stifle the other. We talked everything out in an open hearted, honest way, and he made me promise to keep my heart open for someone new. I did promise. After processing this for half a year, my soulmate and I exchanged PMs and we were together in the flesh within a month. That week, I told him he was staying in my country and marrying me. It was not a demand or a question, just a matter of fact statement. Finally, my romantic inclination was strong, in the present. I knew he was it, and I didn't want to go back.

That little paragraph that channeled itself through me after his first post, about memories... I find it interesting now, with everything in perspective. Memories had been the devil's lure, at that time, but I had lured those demons of mine to dance with my angels so that my past, present and future might unite as one powerful motivating force of pure and committed love.

After years of romanticizing my past and ideals, I have to say it's much more soulful than being present, right here right now, with the man I love, the project I'm doing and the friends I adore. This is innocence. There's no reason to forget the past or to stop having hopes for the future, but all of this may be integrated into the present flow. My concept of memories, dreams and time may whirl around me like a galaxy around a black hole, but at the center is the energetic force of right now, around which all else gravitates. To me, harnessing that sort of flow, and being fully present within it, is the most romantic notion of all.

[Animal]

We had a short wedding ceremony, in which our friend, who married us, read aloud a dream I'd had about my soulmate before I met him. He wrote it into beautiful words, and she read it.

Then, this quote:


? Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

[vermilionplum]

Wot in synchronicity, I swear S;G related stuff has been popping up all the time lately, probably because it's December and a good chunk of the story takes place in winter.

This is literally the plot of Steins;Gate series- moreso S;G0 than the first game/season. Basically mad scientist invents time machine, gets a gf, universe (kinda) keeps them apart but at the same time throwing them together, dude time travels to get to a world where they can be together.

But they do end up in a universe where they're together. You might like that series.

[[redacted]]

ah right, I knew it was reminding me of something