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e in a big ancient crumbling house with creaking floorboards and children who never called, nothing but the sounds of the wind to keep me company at night;</li><li>me as an old man, in love with some kind and well-meaning spouse who quietly and secretly resented me for abandoning my dreams… or for abandoning their own, and in these self-punishing projections perhaps I or the spouse would even keep these dreams locked away somewhere, scraps of newspaper clippings and ideas, in some special secret abandoned dream box that I or he or we would visit on sad occasions like birthdays or after breakfast or whenever I saw that my old boyfriend, the famous one, got a new and more fabulous job on LinkedIn;</li><li>and perhaps the most painful… me as an old man… alone altogether. No partner. No children. No fame. No anything. Just alone. In a vast empty void, taking pills to nurse myself gently back to sleep. Dreaming and mourning a father, a mother, a sister, my children, a spouse, all the people who’d long gone, all the people who are very much still alive right now in 2023, people that I could be with, that I could be hugging, instead of thinking so endlessly about my preoccupation with their dying, with my inevitable and eventual loss.</li></ul>It’s not that I fear getting old, per se. I think age and the wisdom that comes with it is marvelous. It’s that I fear having somehow been judged as a person who wasted their time on earth between cradle and grave. As if it is possible for anyone to completely waste a life (!), but these intrusions don’t necessarily adhere to norms of logic or reason.The fear is that somehow the God of my life, who I guess in this scenario is Me, Myself, and I — will greet me on judgment day with pity, and list all the things I could’ve done better.(Any people pleasers in the house currently experiencing their worst nightmare right now? I’m so sorry, my loves! lol.)I guess I’m writing this because I’m curious. What did you think about when you were young? Were you like me? What preoccupations filled your mind?I remember thinking about impending death so often as a young child, and feeling keenly aware that it could and might strike at any moment. I can’t imagine that I was terribly fun as a schoolyard playmate.In between games of kickball at recess, I remember telling my friends that I was worried we would all die too soon, and that we needed to find more viable ways to make the most of our adolescence. Time was running out! Couldn’t they see?!Being precocious (if we’re being generous) was received lukewarmly; my childhood companions found my strange preoccupations sometimes odd and funny, but other times unnerving and worrisome, who wouldn’t?Some, especially those convinced they had a throughline to ghosts and the other side, indulged me perhaps a little too enthusiastically. Maybe they were as morbid as I was, or maybe make-believe was just so much of an exciting realm that no matter how spooky, they were game to imagine.Other children made me feel small, telling me that it was wrong to think about death, strange and odd to fixate on the end when we were so close to the beginning. Of course, they used different words. So much of how we communicated back then was through tears, hugs, small presents of flowers or sticks, little notes written with checkboxes, every word always misshapen and misspelled.I remember one friend in particular who was missing more teeth than was normal to be missing at that age; I remember him saying that he never thought about death ever — period — and that he thought it was strange and terrible that I did so often.I felt like an omen, or a Nephilim, something not of this world.We were seven or eight, and I remember being so envious of the boy, my death-free friend, how lovely it must be to grow up and not ever think about dying.I learned quickly to keep my preoccupations to myself. I started letting the characters in the stories I wrote worry about these things instead. I was the only child I knew who wasn’t writing adventure stories but was penning poorly worded melancholic retrospectives.I remember one “book” of mine (aren’t kids cute?) that was about an angel who was cast away from heaven; he was sent to earth to look after a girl who couldn’t stop thinking about dying, the two would go on long walks and she would tell him all about her problems at home, all the horrible things she was trying to survive, and the angel would just listen. He couldn’t give her magic powers or heal her or help her because he’d been cast out of heaven. All he could do was let her speak and be there for her whenever she needed.Needless to say, it didn’t become a bestseller, not even in the schoolyard. I remember children my age always wanted stories about monsters and dragons, which I also enjoyed, but I remember being quite a bit more curious about the people back in the village.How does this maiden feel, for example, knowing that her husband is going out to slay dragons all night? Who’s taking care of the kids? Is she lonely? If her husband gets eaten by this dragon will she remarry? Or will she hold a silent flame of longing for her fallen lover?I’m sure my confused sexuality had something to do with all this; I knew that I wasn’t fully like the other kids, but I didn’t realize I was gay or even know what that word meant until high school.Back then, before I’d learned how to express my thoughts in that way, e

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verything was through books and stories.I was particularly taken with witches. I felt that the isolated members of society, especially the ones who could be so interesting as to conjure the ire of an angry mob, must certainly be the people I should be paying attention to most.That ignoramuses who willingly burn my heroes at the stake only made them more fascinating to me. Surely they would be the most clever members of the society. After all, you don’t try to silence a person unless you fear the power of their voice.It’s like the Avoxes in The Hunger Games, the Capitol enemies who had their tongues cut out. What an eerily reminiscent image of today’s horrors. Empires hate dissent, so if they don’t kill you, they’ll cut out your tongue or say, kill your journalists to ensure that you can’t ever speak freely….(I’ve wandered off-topic. Perhaps this line of thinking is an essay for another time.)My godmother also has a preoccupation with death, a fact that endeared her greatly to me. I liked my godmother back then more than she probably knew. I found (and still find) her to be fascinating, and I remember childhood with her so fondly, picking fruit in her mother’s orchard, all those animals, riding recklessly on the backs of various tractor-like vehicles through sandy fields and endless trees.She made me realize that the outside world can be just as beautiful and strange as the world inside my books or the world inside my mind.I also liked her because she wasn’t ever afraid to talk to me about dying; death didn’t seem to bother her like it bothered the other adults, and she’d watch my favorite movies with me, like The Mummy and The Mummy Returns. In retrospect, the Brendan Fraser obsession was an early sign of my queerness, but at the time I just thought I had an erudite appreciation of Egyptology!!!I think I like people, like my Godmother, who don’t pretend we aren’t always in a slight state of decay. I think the cognitive dissonance of trying to constantly pretend like we have all the time in the world is somehow offensive to me, though I’m not sure why.Somewhat ironically and in semi-contrast to this line of memories, I’ve also often been haunted by this feeling ever since I can remember that I somehow don’t recall much of my childhood at all, that it is as if I missed it, or even worse, that I made it up; that my memory actually starts sometime around age twenty and everything before that is a blur of invention or nothingness.I have some sharp pangs of knowing from childhood, but the rest seems messy, perhaps concocted, as if these things couldn’t have really happened to me. Yet they were my memories.I struggle to remember what were dreams, what was real, and what have I filled in to make up for the silences, the disappointments, the losses, and all that loneliness.This movie tonight was oddly a trigger for all of these anxious feelings and bittersweet memories and also a rather effective balm of sorts. It’s funny how that happens.The film makes me feel so despondent and melancholic, but also fills me with a deep sense of personhood, that I am so human, so alive, and so very part of our human family.I imagine to the cynical intellectual this film would read as cheesy and vacuous, but I think so much of the film is aiming to puncture that very same cynical exterior of the modern intellectual, however clumsily, and recognizing that we all are just lonely souls, vulnerably reaching out for connection, either physically or with our written words, often in a desperate hope that someone will see us, will love us, will hold us, will whisk us away somewhere safe, somewhere warm, somewhere like childhood, that they will feel our hearts and our minds, and will share theirs in return; that our vulnerability won’t be in vain and that somehow we won’t get our hearts broken in the process, even though that is such an inevitability of being alive and being truly brave with your life.This film is also nice and simple in ways, because I feel like media representations of working writers in 2023 rarely offer that bit of escapist absurdity of publishing a bestseller when you’re nineteen, and sometimes it is indeed fun to visit la la land, and exist in the world of wunderkinds who unironically reference Kurt Vonnegut in casual dinner conversation.I sometimes ache for the younger version of myself — do you? — those selves who were drunk at parties with friends, companions now dead, or married, some overdosed, some lost to suicide, some living far away, those poets I loved, all those beautiful and strange men I dated, the endless line of women who danced with me for hours and hours across countries, across entire years, sometimes until the sun rose, sometimes much further than that.I ache for all the lives I’ve lived and left behind. And in each of those lives, in each chapter, I’ve had at least one quiet night with this movie, Stuck in Love, often in the company of someone I care about very much.Tonight, that someone was my father, who loves the film like I do, and who cries at all the same parts.If you enjoyed this piece, <a href="https://alexlopezwrites.substack.com/subscribe?">please consider becoming a paid subscriber.</a> Your support will aid a young Latinx writer striving to achieve his dream of promoting kindness and resilience through art. I’m so pleased you’re here and I am wishing you love and liberation, daily.</article></body>

Saudade: an emotional state of longing, nostalgia, or melancholic yearning for something or someone that is absent, lost, and may never return…

A reflection on longing, loss, and the films that bring us back

Tonight, Dad and I watched Stuck in Love.

This film always makes me cry. There’s something about it that reminds me of the optimism I had so strongly when I was younger. An optimism that technically is still here, but now battles more frequently with the chronic cynicism and exhaustion of adulthood.

Despite having lived a somewhat adventurous life across many countries and countless cities, I have a deep-seated fear of waking up one day and regretting my entire existence, that I will somehow rise on some unknown and unremarkable future morning and feel a state of life-altering regret and shame, a feeling that I have somehow spent all my life on the wrong things or the wrong people, or worst of all, in the wrong state of mind, that I’d missed everything good, that I’d been so preoccupied with success, that I forgot to really live entirely.

Does anyone else have this same persistent fear of wrongness?

Or rather, a fear of future fear? What is the fear of fear exactly? Apparently, those who are afraid of being afraid have phobophobia. It’s not that exactly. It’s more the fear of letting myself down. Is there a word for that?

The closest thing I can find is Saudade.

“Saudade is a Portuguese word that represents a deep emotional state of longing, nostalgia, or melancholic yearning for something or someone that is absent, lost, or may never return. It’s a complex and profound feeling, often associated with a deep sense of emptiness or incompleteness. This word is used to describe the bittersweet and profound emotions that arise when reminiscing about the past, yearning for a distant place, or missing someone deeply. It encapsulates the idea of longing for something that is both cherished and unattainable.”

So in my case, I have the fear of being so overcome with saudade that I no longer recognize myself.

I should note that this is not in any way a reflection on anything I currently do or anyone I spend time with, all of which and who I love and cherish very much. I’m incredibly proud of my beautiful, eclectic, vibrant life and I adore the wonderful people in it, making this feeling of persistent fear of future regret quite unwelcome.

It’s almost like the pain of an unwanted intrusive thought, the flash of a horrible image or idea — like when you’re standing at the train platform in Brooklyn waiting for the subway to arrive and you think,

What if I stepped forward and fell? Would people intervene or just let me die? Who would come to my funeral? What would they say about me? Would people miss me? Who would get up at my funeral and give cringy speeches pretending like they knew me super well when they didn’t know me at all? Who wouldn’t speak that actually knew me the most?

I can almost see the headline:

LOCAL WRITER SQUASHED UNDERNEATH ONCOMING L TRAIN WHILE LOST IN CONTEMPLATION -- Sunday, July 6th, 2097

…yeah, I better not.

Only, this too isn’t it, for it suggests my fear is that of dying itself, which I don’t much fear at all.

Rather, I think, the intrusive thought is that of a visitor from an alternate future where I’m someone I don’t recognize. Where a man who bears my name and my likeness and who is me becomes utterly unrecognizable to the person I am now.

That is my fear, I think, that I will somehow abandon myself for good, and worst of all, that I will do it accidentally(!) while I was busy focusing on other things, perhaps falling in love with another man (sigh) who inevitably breaks my heart, or I don’t know, what sorts of things can a life be wasted on? Use your imagination.

The fear is — let me try to put a finger on it — that I will lose control and step off the platform of normality, descending into chaos or madness or illness or incoherence, or that I will make a string of seemingly innocuous bad decisions or bad investments or bad ideas that slowly build and build and no one will intervene, and each one will bring with it a greater debt than the last, and with each mistake, I’ll drift further and further away from my potential, and I’ll arrive at a life I can’t bear, I’ll become someone or something that I cannot stand, that I can’t stomach.

It’s more than a fear of failure. It’s a fear of abandonment. Only the person I fear abandoning me… is me.

I have had this fear, oddly, since I was a little boy. What kind of seven-year-old thinks so often about self-abandonment and potentially regretting their life choices? Apparently, I did.

I have vivid memories of wandering down the muddy edges of the lake in my town, watching the baby turtles that hung suspended in the water, only their tiny heads visible and full of beady brown eyes, hovering completely still above the water’s murky surface, little sentient dots sent to spy on the human world, collect as much information as possible.

It was there that I would imagine all sorts of scenarios:

me as an old man, accomplished, awarded, famous, lauded even! yet all alone in a big ancient crumbling house with creaking floorboards and children who never called, nothing but the sounds of the wind to keep me company at night;
me as an old man, in love with some kind and well-meaning spouse who quietly and secretly resented me for abandoning my dreams… or for abandoning their own, and in these self-punishing projections perhaps I or the spouse would even keep these dreams locked away somewhere, scraps of newspaper clippings and ideas, in some special secret abandoned dream box that I or he or we would visit on sad occasions like birthdays or after breakfast or whenever I saw that my old boyfriend, the famous one, got a new and more fabulous job on LinkedIn;
and perhaps the most painful… me as an old man… alone altogether. No partner. No children. No fame. No anything. Just alone. In a vast empty void, taking pills to nurse myself gently back to sleep. Dreaming and mourning a father, a mother, a sister, my children, a spouse, all the people who’d long gone, all the people who are very much still alive right now in 2023, people that I could be with, that I could be hugging, instead of thinking so endlessly about my preoccupation with their dying, with my inevitable and eventual loss.

It’s not that I fear getting old, per se. I think age and the wisdom that comes with it is marvelous. It’s that I fear having somehow been judged as a person who wasted their time on earth between cradle and grave. As if it is possible for anyone to completely waste a life (!), but these intrusions don’t necessarily adhere to norms of logic or reason.

The fear is that somehow the God of my life, who I guess in this scenario is Me, Myself, and I — will greet me on judgment day with pity, and list all the things I could’ve done better.

(Any people pleasers in the house currently experiencing their worst nightmare right now? I’m so sorry, my loves! lol.)

I guess I’m writing this because I’m curious. What did you think about when you were young? Were you like me? What preoccupations filled your mind?

I remember thinking about impending death so often as a young child, and feeling keenly aware that it could and might strike at any moment. I can’t imagine that I was terribly fun as a schoolyard playmate.

In between games of kickball at recess, I remember telling my friends that I was worried we would all die too soon, and that we needed to find more viable ways to make the most of our adolescence. Time was running out! Couldn’t they see?!

Being precocious (if we’re being generous) was received lukewarmly; my childhood companions found my strange preoccupations sometimes odd and funny, but other times unnerving and worrisome, who wouldn’t?

Some, especially those convinced they had a throughline to ghosts and the other side, indulged me perhaps a little too enthusiastically. Maybe they were as morbid as I was, or maybe make-believe was just so much of an exciting realm that no matter how spooky, they were game to imagine.

Other children made me feel small, telling me that it was wrong to think about death, strange and odd to fixate on the end when we were so close to the beginning. Of course, they used different words. So much of how we communicated back then was through tears, hugs, small presents of flowers or sticks, little notes written with checkboxes, every word always misshapen and misspelled.

I remember one friend in particular who was missing more teeth than was normal to be missing at that age; I remember him saying that he never thought about death ever — period — and that he thought it was strange and terrible that I did so often.

I felt like an omen, or a Nephilim, something not of this world.

We were seven or eight, and I remember being so envious of the boy, my death-free friend, how lovely it must be to grow up and not ever think about dying.

I learned quickly to keep my preoccupations to myself. I started letting the characters in the stories I wrote worry about these things instead. I was the only child I knew who wasn’t writing adventure stories but was penning poorly worded melancholic retrospectives.

I remember one “book” of mine (aren’t kids cute?) that was about an angel who was cast away from heaven; he was sent to earth to look after a girl who couldn’t stop thinking about dying, the two would go on long walks and she would tell him all about her problems at home, all the horrible things she was trying to survive, and the angel would just listen. He couldn’t give her magic powers or heal her or help her because he’d been cast out of heaven. All he could do was let her speak and be there for her whenever she needed.

Needless to say, it didn’t become a bestseller, not even in the schoolyard. I remember children my age always wanted stories about monsters and dragons, which I also enjoyed, but I remember being quite a bit more curious about the people back in the village.

How does this maiden feel, for example, knowing that her husband is going out to slay dragons all night? Who’s taking care of the kids? Is she lonely? If her husband gets eaten by this dragon will she remarry? Or will she hold a silent flame of longing for her fallen lover?

I’m sure my confused sexuality had something to do with all this; I knew that I wasn’t fully like the other kids, but I didn’t realize I was gay or even know what that word meant until high school.

Back then, before I’d learned how to express my thoughts in that way, everything was through books and stories.

I was particularly taken with witches. I felt that the isolated members of society, especially the ones who could be so interesting as to conjure the ire of an angry mob, must certainly be the people I should be paying attention to most.

That ignoramuses who willingly burn my heroes at the stake only made them more fascinating to me. Surely they would be the most clever members of the society. After all, you don’t try to silence a person unless you fear the power of their voice.

It’s like the Avoxes in The Hunger Games, the Capitol enemies who had their tongues cut out. What an eerily reminiscent image of today’s horrors. Empires hate dissent, so if they don’t kill you, they’ll cut out your tongue or say, kill your journalists to ensure that you can’t ever speak freely….

(I’ve wandered off-topic. Perhaps this line of thinking is an essay for another time.)

My godmother also has a preoccupation with death, a fact that endeared her greatly to me. I liked my godmother back then more than she probably knew. I found (and still find) her to be fascinating, and I remember childhood with her so fondly, picking fruit in her mother’s orchard, all those animals, riding recklessly on the backs of various tractor-like vehicles through sandy fields and endless trees.

She made me realize that the outside world can be just as beautiful and strange as the world inside my books or the world inside my mind.

I also liked her because she wasn’t ever afraid to talk to me about dying; death didn’t seem to bother her like it bothered the other adults, and she’d watch my favorite movies with me, like The Mummy and The Mummy Returns. In retrospect, the Brendan Fraser obsession was an early sign of my queerness, but at the time I just thought I had an erudite appreciation of Egyptology!!!

I think I like people, like my Godmother, who don’t pretend we aren’t always in a slight state of decay. I think the cognitive dissonance of trying to constantly pretend like we have all the time in the world is somehow offensive to me, though I’m not sure why.

Somewhat ironically and in semi-contrast to this line of memories, I’ve also often been haunted by this feeling ever since I can remember that I somehow don’t recall much of my childhood at all, that it is as if I missed it, or even worse, that I made it up; that my memory actually starts sometime around age twenty and everything before that is a blur of invention or nothingness.

I have some sharp pangs of knowing from childhood, but the rest seems messy, perhaps concocted, as if these things couldn’t have really happened to me. Yet they were my memories.

I struggle to remember what were dreams, what was real, and what have I filled in to make up for the silences, the disappointments, the losses, and all that loneliness.

This movie tonight was oddly a trigger for all of these anxious feelings and bittersweet memories and also a rather effective balm of sorts. It’s funny how that happens.

The film makes me feel so despondent and melancholic, but also fills me with a deep sense of personhood, that I am so human, so alive, and so very part of our human family.

I imagine to the cynical intellectual this film would read as cheesy and vacuous, but I think so much of the film is aiming to puncture that very same cynical exterior of the modern intellectual, however clumsily, and recognizing that we all are just lonely souls, vulnerably reaching out for connection, either physically or with our written words, often in a desperate hope that someone will see us, will love us, will hold us, will whisk us away somewhere safe, somewhere warm, somewhere like childhood, that they will feel our hearts and our minds, and will share theirs in return; that our vulnerability won’t be in vain and that somehow we won’t get our hearts broken in the process, even though that is such an inevitability of being alive and being truly brave with your life.

This film is also nice and simple in ways, because I feel like media representations of working writers in 2023 rarely offer that bit of escapist absurdity of publishing a bestseller when you’re nineteen, and sometimes it is indeed fun to visit la la land, and exist in the world of wunderkinds who unironically reference Kurt Vonnegut in casual dinner conversation.

I sometimes ache for the younger version of myself — do you? — those selves who were drunk at parties with friends, companions now dead, or married, some overdosed, some lost to suicide, some living far away, those poets I loved, all those beautiful and strange men I dated, the endless line of women who danced with me for hours and hours across countries, across entire years, sometimes until the sun rose, sometimes much further than that.

I ache for all the lives I’ve lived and left behind. And in each of those lives, in each chapter, I’ve had at least one quiet night with this movie, Stuck in Love, often in the company of someone I care about very much.

Tonight, that someone was my father, who loves the film like I do, and who cries at all the same parts.

If you enjoyed this piece, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support will aid a young Latinx writer striving to achieve his dream of promoting kindness and resilience through art. I’m so pleased you’re here and I am wishing you love and liberation, daily.