Faraway Prince

"I will always love the maiden who ran away," said the Prince as he parted from Cinderella, in the woods.

"And I, the Faraway Prince."

Not only is that a good example of gapping (ahh linguistics...), it's a poignant expression of how we fall in love with ideas and symbols more easily than with people. It's a delicate line, since in fact we only experience our own consciousness and we only experience other people through what we get to see of them from the outside, filtered through all the categories we've been socialized to view the world in. Can we ever really love a person, or can we just refine and refine the image of them constructed in our head so that it more and more reflects nuances and individualities--but never perfectly? Like Reimann sums, or something. Step functions.

Cinderella and her Prince loved each other more as distant ideals than as embodied people; my old away message (I do miss away messages, now in my non-AIM days...) about soulmates said that a soulmate is someone with whom the reality is always better than the daydreams. Another way of saying that would be to say that a true soulmate is someone you will love more intensely, more deeply, the closer you are to experiencing the person as an embodied individual, not just a representation inside your own mind. If that's the case, then I must be in love. And I'm so tired of my own Prince being so damn Faraway. And I should be able to take it in stride, and know that it's best for the long run, and that a few days of only talking briefly don't mean anything, don't really put more distance between us. But it makes him into more of a daydream and less of a reality and I just miss him terribly, and miss something I've never had, seeing him and walking around together and sitting together studying or listening to music or watching a movie or going to an art gallery or the aquarium and seeing him laugh and meeting for lunch between classes or surprising him at the library or just sitting together relaxing after long days. I don't want to be in love with a daydream. And then when I talk to him, for just a few minutes, I'm overwhelmed with missing him and with loving him and I can't possibly cram all of that feeling into a five minute conversation, so I end up saying nothing and feeling more distant. When your lives intertwine with each other, you don't need every little conversation to convey the depths of your feelings. When you can only talk for a few minutes each day and spend the rest of the time weighed down by the feeling of distance and of being blocked from just being together freely, then those brief moments of actual contact become too loaded to be satisfying. The only real way to ever convey the depth of love is to build it up through a lifetime of little moments that on their own could never contain the whole emotion.

And now, some lyrics that don't entirely relate, but sort of do, that I happened to listen to today and find powerful:

Something's missing,
Could it be your hand in mine?
I think your lips are worth kissing,
And I sure would like a try.

If that's not the way you wanna go,
Then we'll take it slow my Indigo;
I'm looking for a way for me to show
How I love you, my Indigo...

Is this the way it should be,
You far away from me?
How I missed you...