Maybe My Art Is Romance: The Risk of Being Seen
Love · Longing · The unlived life
Maybe My Art Is Romance
What do we owe the life we have, and the life that asks us to become someone else?
I watched The Bridges of Madison County, and something in me is still standing in the rain.
I keep thinking about what it means to let something pass. To feel a possibility arrive in your life and understand, even before you know what to call it, that following it would change things.
People. Promises. The way you understand yourself.
And then to have to decide.
I’ve been going through a dark night of the soul lately. For a moment, I wondered whether I had been deeply mistaken about what I felt in life. I have spent so many years believing in something bigger than myself, while people around me seemed to find that belief foolish.
Eventually, their doubt began to sound like my own voice.
Was I too romantic? Had I asked love to mean too much? Was there something wrong with me for wanting it to reach so deeply into my life?
I know artists who spend years devoted to something other people cannot yet see. They return to a canvas, a song, a story. They struggle with it. They sacrifice for it. Sometimes they cannot explain why they keep going, except that something in them insists.
There is a line in the film that stayed with me:
“I don’t think obsessions have reasons. That’s why they’re obsessions.”
Robert says it about his photography. I hear it and think about the things we return to before we know how to explain them. The things that keep asking for our attention.
Maybe my art is romance.
I’m trying to understand what it means to live with that.
The question that follows me out of this film is painfully simple: how do we keep from missing out on something important?
We make decisions based on what we believe is best for everyone else. We imagine their hurt. We count what they could lose. We feel responsible for keeping the world we share intact.
But when I imagine every person affected by a choice, how often do I include myself? Where do I put the cost of what I will never experience?
What if the life we call “unchanged” is simply the life in which we’ve agreed to carry all the change inside us?
Because walking away changes us, too. We may keep the same address, sit at the same table, answer to the same name. Still, something has happened. We have encountered a possibility and made a choice about it. We have to live with that choice, even when nobody else knows we made it.
A brief encounter can leave a mark that lasts for years. There is something beautiful in that, and something almost unbearable. We know what happened in the little time we had. Everything beyond it remains open to imagination.
That unfinished place can hold so much. Hope. Grief. A version of ourselves we barely got to meet.
I wonder how much of what we miss is the person, and how much is who we felt free to be in their presence.
What happens when you stand in front of someone and their presence moves you so deeply that you begin to question where you are? You are still in the same room, still living the same life, but suddenly you can feel how far you have travelled from yourself.
Is this love? Is it longing? Is it the shock of feeling seen in a place you had stopped expecting anyone to look?
I want to stay with those questions long enough to hear an answer. Yet sometimes even allowing the questions feels dangerous. Once you admit how alive you feel, you have to reckon with where you have been going numb.
And what if we do reach for it?
How do we become the person who disrupts everything and live with it?
I want to be honest about that question. Other people’s pain is real. A powerful feeling cannot make every action right. Wanting something deeply doesn’t tell us whether another person can meet us there, or whether the love we imagine could survive an ordinary Tuesday.
But fear has uncertainties of its own. Staying where we are gives us no guarantee that we will be whole, that nobody will suffer, that we will be glad we stayed.
I keep wanting a view of both lives before I choose. I want to know what happens if I speak, and what happens if I remain silent. I want certainty before I risk being seen.
There is no place to stand where both lives are visible.
We have to choose while the life we might live is still a stranger.
Perhaps that is why being honest feels so frightening. Once we say what we feel, another person gets to answer. They might turn toward us. They might not. The beautiful possibility becomes something real enough to disappoint us or surprise us.
And we lose the shelter of never having found out.
What are we so afraid of? Wasting our lives waiting for something that may never come? Or falling into something so amazing that we can no longer pretend the life we have is all we want?
I think about the deep end. How we stand at its edge imagining everything that could pull us under. Do we give equal thought to what it might feel like to be held? To discover that we can swim there? To find a love in which parts of us we have kept separate finally belong together?
Sometimes I wonder whether that is what I mean when I say a love could complete me: the possibility of bringing my whole self into the room and finding that I don’t have to leave any of it at the door.
But to find out, I would have to let someone see me wanting it. I would have to stand there without knowing whether they would reach back.
That sounds terrifying.
So does the thought of spending years at the edge, calling it safety, while wondering what the water might have felt like.
Maybe putting ourselves out there begins with one honest sentence. Maybe it begins with asking whether the feeling is shared, or admitting that something in our present life needs attention. Before any grand gesture, there is the quieter courage of saying what is true and listening to what comes back.
We expose ourselves to consequences. We expose ourselves to gifts.
I don’t know how to have one possibility without the other.
For years, I have asked myself: how can I feel this deeply, be driven by this for so long, if it’s wrong?
I’m beginning to think I’ve asked that question to do too much. I’ve wanted the strength of my feelings to tell me what will happen, whom to trust, which way to go. They can’t know all of that.
But they tell me something about what matters to me. And after years of questioning myself, I want to listen with some tenderness.
I want to believe in love and remain curious about the person in front of me. I want to ask questions whose answers I can’t control. I want to make room for a love that has a life of its own, beyond what I have imagined.
I may still miss things. I may make a choice I grieve. There are possibilities I will never know enough about to stop wondering.
Yet I don’t want other people’s disbelief to make every decision for me. I want a voice in my own life, even when that voice shakes.
Sometimes I think the depth of my devotion scares people. The way I believe in love, the room I am willing to make for it, the possibility I can imagine so clearly. I struggle to explain the vision without feeling that I have already revealed too much.
Perhaps someone, somewhere, can envision it too. Someone who brings their own hopes to it, who wants to discover with me what that love could look like in a life we actually share.
I imagine the courage it would take for both of us to arrive in all our nakedness. To speak the desire we usually soften, admit what frightens us, and let ourselves be known before we know whether we will be loved.
That is the meeting I hope for. The chance to look at someone and feel them choosing to be there, as exposed and willing as I am. To hear them say, in their own way: I can imagine it too. Shall we find out?
Maybe my art is romance. Maybe I am still learning how to practice it: with honesty, with care, with enough courage to let reality answer me.
A life that is mine
I cannot know every life I might have lived.
But I want to be present for the choosing of this one.