Travesty

"We all feed on tragedy
It's like blood to a vampire.

Vicariously, I
Live while the whole world dies
Much better you than I."


Why is it that human beings have such an appetite for tragedy? An appetite that even drowns out our appetite for love? Some of the greatest "love" stories in the world are based in tragedy. Look at Romeo and Juliet. Death and destruction. And more recently, look at Twilight. How much darkness and corruption and fear and sadness is in that series as a whole?

What about Wuthering Heights? There's a new version of it on tv round about now. "Oh, that's a beautiful story", Jared's mum said. But it's not. I admit that I haven't watched or read the whole thing yet, but I don't think it's a good idea for me to. I watched the first half of it last sunday and what do we see right away at the beginning? Heathcliffe, hopelessly and frighteningly obsessed, digs up Catherine's coffin, wrenches the thing apart and, though his own deluded mind sees her merely sleeping, the truth is that he climbs into the coffin and strokes the bones of his former love. And we are supposed to look at this as a beautiful story? It carries on. We go back in time and we see the two, Catherine and Heathcliffe, helplessly and hopelessly attached to each other. And yet what does she do? She marries someone else. The two torture each other. So much agony and anger. This is not love. This is obsession. Mutual obsession, disguised and paraded as "true love".

IT IS ALL A LIE.

In one of my English courses this year, one of the subjects we studied is "love". Again, the text we studied was not about love. It was about lust, obsession, infatuation. Not love. It angered me so much to hear people advertising this travesty of emotion as love, as true love, as soulmates.

LIES.

I have been obsessed with people. I have had people obsessed with me. I have felt lust and infatuation. And now I have experienced true love. And let me tell you, obsession and love are NOTHING alike. Nothing. It makes me so ANGRY that a writer or film maker can do this, can taint and corrupt the idea of love with their horrible, obsessive characters. And yet these "works of art", these "great love stories" are bought and eaten up by the average person! What kind of corrupted, twisted view of love does the population have if these horrible, frightening, tragic stories are viewed as stories of true love?

Perhaps if they are correct, then nobody experiences true love. I know of nobody who has had stories like Romeo and Juliet and Wuthering Heights happen to them in the real world. But I know that I have true love. I know it like I know who I am. And so, from my anger at popular authors and directers, comes fear. If what I have is true love, then there is only one path for it... the Wuthering Heights path, the Romeo and Juliet path, the Twilight path... the path to destruction. The destruction of the mind. The destruction of life. The destruction of other people's lives. I am so afraid. How can such a force of good have such bad effects?

I don't know who to believe- the world, or myself.