I keep on wondering whether all my life I wanted to be in love with an idea of perfection. After all, there are plenty of perfect people out in the world, all with a level of perfection more perfect than the last. But then, sitting here on a steel table on the lawn in front of the Barnard College Library, I realize that that perfection is something that can be taken away. I don’t look for perfection anymore because there is nothing that can capture the essence of a perfection that I cannot even conceptualize myself. It is my perfection, but I don’t even know what is my perfection, even though it is my perfection.There is the ideal, of course, of what I idealize. But, given the nature of idealization, it is the idea itself that exists in the form of perfection. When the idea is consecrated in to an individual, it no longer is the ideal idea that it had been idealized to be. The consecration, by nature, reduces the ideal to a form. The form is not perfect because it is not the ideal. The form is human, and it is human to be imperfect. It would seem unjust, therefore, to characterize the human form into an ideal because the human form is not an idea. The human form is tainted with imperfection, yet there is so much expectation for the human form to conform to an ideal. Why is that the case? A love sustained through longing — that was how I had characterized the relationship that had defined most of my conception of love. It seems that in our attempts to idealize the individual that cannot exist in the form of an idea while retaining the full reality of their form, we construct an image around a feeling that becomes more real to us than the actual individual existing in their form. The reduction of reality and the privileging of idealization creates a separate reality that becomes more real than the reality we occupy. The metaphysical explanation, however, challenges the intuitive explanation of the ideal love. Yet, what are the origins of the intuitive underpinnings of our conceptions of love? It is certainly a belief that I have had for all of my life, which causes me to believe that my explanation is flawed in some fashion. The nature of truth is that it defies logic because logic is an imperfect medium in observing truth. It is impossible, however, to differentiate the difference between truth and the influence of experience and culture in determining the validity of a perspective becoming objective. I still find it hard to convince myself otherwise because it ingrained within my assumptions about love. Where do these assumptions come from? Yet, It seems that I have reached a point in my lie where I have realized that I will never attain perfection, nor is perfection something I want reflected in others. It is not necessarily that It was the idea that I was constantly striving towards an ideal more perfect than it was before that drove me. It was the idea that the people in my life were more perfect than me. But, no, that is not what I want.

I want something beautiful.