Love Game

Let’s talk about love, as a game, not a notion of children like pieces on the board, being tossed from start to end. I much prefer the idea of throwing dice, because my chances are all the same: snake-eyes you walk away, double-sixes we’re waking up the next morning trying to forget one another. But what happens when we add fourteen more sides to the die and suddenly get tossed into a game of Dungeons and Dragons? Suddenly we’ve walked away from the board and into our heads where I’m still lonely. Now I’m fighting against probability rather than luck, but to the individual those two are the same.

Role-playing is a joke when I talk about trying to get you to see love my way. We’re disillusioned through illusions of frameworks of autonomy, envisioning our characters as having a choice. But choice is bound to laws of the possible and impossible and these laws are bound to what we want to do. As Taylor Swift once sang: “Love’s a game, wanna play…” Some of us want to play, play, play; others want to shake it off and leave me out in the rain. It’s alright, though, because the rain makes it difficult to distinguish my teardrops falling on the dice.

If I don’t cry, though, is it ever real? Dualities create reality, such as there can be no good if there is no evil. In this case you’re nothing but cold and dead which I should thank you for because now I know what it’s like to wish I was truly alive. Had luck and probability aligned, and we found each other as star-crossed lovers, I would never know I was ever happy until you broke my heart and left me to die. But then again, I only exist in these rulebooks and in your imagination as a rejected notion of the man you wished you could be.