Associated Members

My school hosts free concerts in the dining area. There seems to be a rule though: If you walk in alone, people stare at you searching, are you sure you belong here? they say. Are you properly associated with this band? Their stares make me feel unwanted, foreign. Or maybe I only think they are searching because I have this overbearing loneliness that started in my chest and crept through to my thoughts.

Associated. The posters and the band t-shirts are all there to buy so that students can associate with something. We must associate. We have a need to associate ourselves with other people, other things. We don't walk the world speaking of things no one else likes or has heard of. We like to be reassured that they have heard of it too. I like this band, I advertise for it on my shirt. You see my shirt and you mention that you too know that band. You associate yourself with something I like. I feel associated with. We become associates. That can lead to friendships.

Friendships are better because in a friendship we are not simply associating, we are sharing. I share myself with you, my friend. We are always wanting to share ourselves. Wanting to tell about ourselves and wanting to hear about others. We want to share and we want to be shared with. That is how we love.

Love is the ultimate form of sharing. Sharing not simply our ideas and likes, our associations, but ourselves. Sharing our bodies, sharing our hearts. That's what we want the most. It is why we associate. So we can share. So we can love.

The music played behind me. I sat alone. Disassociated. Until a friend came by to say hello. And we talked about a class, class being a way we could associate with each other.



The other night when I was walking back to my dorm I saw a light post in the snow, driven there by a snow plow. I was surprised to see it was lit. As I got closer, the light went out. I stood beside it and told it I do believe in fairies, I do and it got brighter. I left it there, a light struggling between brightening more and dying out altogether.