love me less, so you can love me longer

Went with some new friends to see Woolly Mammoth Theatre's production of Gruesome Playground Injuries last night. Really an interesting and heartbreaking look at the nature of pain - how we deal with it, physically, emotionally, mentally. What are the types of pain that hurt us the most, what are the ones that we, albeit often misguidedly, crave...how we can use one pain to block another.

It also looked at relationships, how it can seem like one relationship always heals you, and yet is the one that you can never quite hold onto, never quite make right. That you can put so much, or so little into something, and yet you or they walk away with just the opposite.

It was about needing - needing so much that you don't know how to get to, that you kill yourself in trying to find...you don't even know what. But damn it if you ever stop looking, damn it if you ever let go.

It was painful, and beautiful, and visual, and emotional. I haven't been to a show in general in a long time, and I was glad to step back in with something that was so artistically interesting. I always love good theatre, but there is something about something that is so artfully and ingenuously crafted that makes you say "Yes! Yes, that is what it is...that is what makes everything worth anything...that humans can create, and construct, and manipulate, and dazzle...that we can take mud and make it a miracle, that we can take a moment and make it magic."

More on the whole night at another time - including the waiter who was blatantly hitting on me, even though he thought I was dating one of the guys I was with (whom I had met maybe 15 minutes before). But for now I am going to bask in my imagination a little more.

The title line is from a film I recently saw with another group - it was the last line of the film - well, in french, but that's the translation. That was such a beautiful fucked up movie about life and love and the perversion of love - not being perverted as people, but failing to understand love, and how to handle it, and looking for it in wrong places. It was about turning love into a weapon to combat our grief. Making love a thing that means less, because it hurt too much when it meant what it should. Taking less than we dream of, because we are afraid to ask for what would be a miracle, in all it's imperfections - to settle because we fear our hearts might burst with too much - with what we have had, or glimpsed, or tasted before....love me less, love me longer.