‘All love is unrequited.’
I finally finished the fourth season of Babylon 5 courtesy of Gamer Girl and The Trekkie. I liked it. I did however cry when it got to Marcus leaving the battle and using the Alien Healing Device.
For those of you not familiar with the plotlines of Baby 5 Marcus is secretly in love with Susan Ivanova…well to the extent that he never actually gets to tell her…gets painfully close throughout the series. She is fatally injured in a space battle and sent home, eventually, to Babylon 5 to die. Then Marcus discovers the existence of an alien artefact on Baby 5 which can leach the life energy from one person and send it into another. Of course in the case of fatal injuries the amount of energy needed will kill the other person.
Marcus finally gets to say ‘I love you’ to Susan, and dies. Susan’s take on this in the next episode (admittedly she is sobbing her heart out at the time) is the quote which begins this entry.
‘All love is unrequited’
Unsurprisingly I agreed with her in a second. You can love and love, but we are such isolated souls linked by this unwieldy commuication tool called language how can anybody who claims to really return that exact nature of love which you feel for them. How can anybody be reached by those tendrils that you send out. Far more likely to miscommunicate, to have those tendrils broken off rather than returned. To have your every emotion rejected, and to learn, eventually to expect such things. To continue to love and shrug off every time someone turns away. No one can feel the same thing for you, after all I considered, look at my past…
A couple of years ago when I was writing on Students Unzipped I wrote that my biggest curiousity was about requited love. It was also something that I would run and run to try and avoid.
But then I really considered my past. I am not a girl of continuity. Stability and me do not exactly get along, momentary passion is something that I can cope with. A reality that demands continuation, repetition, that I do not seem to have the gift of either beginning or coping within.To judge my past by such outside standards is dishonest. To judge by my own standards of moments; to judge my life without listening to the rest of the worlds definitions which I can barely admit that I apparently have not done before; if I judge by my own beliefs then I have been loved back each time I have loved. But I have been listening to ‘what other people say’ too often now. And I have been believing what is said of me as well…I should listen to Rincewind more often.
All love is requited.