Love is a matchstick—Watch me burn through the box
Written on April 17th, 2025 by Zerotistic
“How’s your dating life going?” “It isn’t.” “No dates?” “None.” “Met anybody?” “Not even a stranger’s shadow.” “Apps?” “I’d rather amputate a thumb than swipe.” “So you’re just … happy single?” “Happy? No. Merely unconvinced by the alternatives.”
That small inquisition plays on repeat—like a child tapping the same piano key until the sound turns maddening. I answer with the same cadence each time, half‑ashamed, half‑defiant, wholly fatigued. Their faces crumple in sympathy, then reorganize into faint irritation, as if my refusal to participate in the standard ritual were a personal slight. Some people collect stamps, others collect lovers—yet only one of those hobbies is treated as compulsory.
Blueprints for people who don’t exist
The truth is uglier than my curt replies: I still fall in love constantly—just not with anyone who can love me back. A stranger’s laugh on the tram, the way someone holds a paperback in a café, the slanted light catching a tired smile—each is enough to start construction. I seize a few scattered facts, pour them into wet cement, and erect a cathedral of possibility. In the sanctuary of my skull that phantom partner sparkles: witty, attentive, damaged in exactly the ways I could heal. The storyline writes itself—montages of midnight walks, effortless understanding, two silhouettes blending at the borders. Delusion? Romance. Same substance, different branding.
Then reality shuffles in like the cleaning staff after closing time, turning on the fluorescent lights. My shining architecture dissolves into plastic chairs and sticky floors. The living human—who never auditioned for my production—reveals habits, silences, trajectories that don’t align with my script. And I retreat, muttering the oldest line in theatre: It’s not you, it’s me. More accurate would be: It’s the version of you I manufactured and insisted you inhabit.
Distance, timing, expectations—love’s unholy trinity of sabotage. The first two operate beyond my control; the third I forge myself and then impale myself upon. I watch the pattern replay: idealize, collide with actuality, recoil, nurse the bruise in fantasy’s soft lighting. The hopeless romantic is tragic not because he believes in love, but because he insists it arrive dressed as his dream. Reality, ever underdressed, is turned away at the door.
Tolstoy warned that to promise lifelong love is to believe a candle will keep burning simply because you remain alive. I have stared at enough stubby, guttering wicks to know he spoke plainly. Love is a flame, yes, but life is a wind tunnel: bills, boredom, illness, the slow erosion of novelty. Those who keep the light must cup it with deliberate hands—again and again—accepting that wax will drip, fingers will burn, darkness will come close enough to smell. A couple married fifty‑plus years once told their secret: “We fell in love with forty different people, but they were all the same spouse.” They did not worship constancy; they practiced rediscovery.
My mistake is rarer, though no less fatal: I expect the flame to blaze eternal before it has even been lit. I want the pilot episode and the golden‑anniversary montage to arrive simultaneously. Faced with the ordinary spark of two imperfect humans trying, I judge it premature and walk away. Better lonely than lukewarm, I tell myself. But there is cowardice hiding in that rationale—the fear that if I brave the flicker, I’ll prove incapable of tending it.
Rilke confessed: I am a burden on my own heart. I understand. My love arrives dragging invoices. I give kindness, patience, generosity—not as gifts, but as advance payments. Subconsciously I file receipts, expecting symmetry: You will mirror my tenderness, one day, with interest. Of course you won’t. Love is not a ledger, yet I keep balancing columns in invisible ink and feeling cheated when the arithmetic fails. The worst mistake, say the cynics, is believing that giving breeds equivalent return. They are right, yet the heart is a terrible capitalist: it invests anyway, then sues for emotional damages when the market crashes.
“I love you!” “Where?” “What?” “Show me… Where is this love? I… I can’t see it… I can’t touch it? Can’t feel it.”
I replay that little exchange like a Zen kōan. Where is love? Show me the coordinates, the physical extension. If the feeling can’t be pointed at, measured, insured—does it exist? I am not being cruel; I am demanding evidence. It stammers, because my love lives in narrative, implication, gesture—intangible as fog until departure condenses it into tears on a train window. Absence is the only laboratory that proves presence.
Perhaps that is why I keep my romances hypothetical: they can’t abandon me if they never arrive. I can nurse the glow without facing the ash. Yet even fantasies have half‑lives; they decay into ironic detachment, leaving a fine dust of longing across the furniture of my days.
If we know we will regret faint‑heartedness, why not love with reckless clarity? Because regret is a future ghost, blurry and slow; fear is a present predator, sharp‑toothed and immediate. The mind chooses the pain it can postpone. Also—let’s admit it—half‑measures let us preserve a flattering illusion: I could have been magnificent, had I truly tried. Full effort risks full exposure. Better to claim the candle went out because we sheltered it too little than because our hands were clumsy.
And so, each time possibility knocks, I peer through the spy‑hole, then tiptoe away, rehearsing lines for the post‑mortem: Timing was off. Distance too great. She deserved better. All true, all irrelevant. The core remains: I feared the flicker would not survive my imperfections.
Once in a rare season, courage ambushes me. I write the message, schedule the coffee, confess the warmth. For an afternoon, the world feels suspiciously vivid: colors upshift, background noise acquires melodic undertones. It is terrifying. I understand why most people call this being alive. I also understand why I scuttle back to my burrow afterward. Aliveness is exhausting; it demands maintenance. The candle gutters faster when it finally meets oxygen. Yet those short-lived infernos haunt me with proof that something more than safety exists.
What does one do with love’s remnants? Some display them like war medals, others grind them into nihilism. I collect mine in small ceramic bowls, label the shards: Spring Infatuation, 2021. Subway Smile, 2023. They sit on the shelf, neither trash nor treasure. Occasionally I sift through them, the way archaeologists study charred seed husks to infer vanished forests. The lesson is always the same: there was fire here once.
I’d like to believe I’ll try again—strike a match, shield it from the wind, accept singed skin as tuition. But tonight I feel the drift toward fabrication, the safer lover. I understand now that the hopeless romantic and the confirmed cynic share a single wound, displayed under different lighting. Both believe reality will never live up to their longing; only their coping mechanisms differ. One escapes forward into daydreams, the other retreats backward into irony. I ping‑pong between the two, gathering bruises.
Love is fleeting because we are fleeting: moods, circumstances, bodies—everything migrates. Distance, timing, expectations. Two of those we cannot master; the third we might, if willing to trade fantasy for friction, ideal for imperfect endurance. I don’t know whether I will manage that swap. Perhaps next time someone asks, “So you’re happy single?” I’ll say, “No, but I’m studying the syllabus.” Until then I keep my candle and my cowardice side by side, wondering which one I will choose to light when dawn comes gray and windless.
Two‑Voice Reflection
A match flares briefly
Love—did you see it burn bright?
Smoke curls in silence
I saw—but dared not breathe in.
The wick, still glowing
Try again, the night is long—
A trembling answer
I will—if morning waits