For the First & Last Time (Repost)

​Conditional Love isn't a break-up book. That interpretation always slightly bothered me, even though I get how the title can make it semi like a (failed) romance story. I wrote it between two periods of my life when I was happily with two different people. I like the look of my own naval way too much to write about other people or real life events like that. It was inspired by the Slayer lyric, "Before you see the light, first you must die" and the concept of baptism by fire and was mostly outlined/written between 2011 and 2016. From what I remember, I took 2017 off and finished it in late 2018/early 2019.

The eponymous affection is the limitations of human beings' ability to care for each other. The students at the school are all decent people but don't accept each other due to a political binary that is more shallow than their own day-to-day morality. Wes and his mother struggle to accept Whit and Wes worries if his daughter will accept him when she grows up. He struggles to accept his father. Ione struggles to accept Brendan as her husband. Wes struggles to accept himself as an artist. He struggles to accept women as being just as human and complex as he is (the pseudo-esoteric framing of Theresa within her apartment as though she's a psychic through which Wes is connecting with his dead sister).  He struggles to accept his responsibilities in life (neglecting his mother when she needs his support). By the end (his reading at the end of the semester for his final), he denounces himself that as being worth others' acceptance.

The narrator experiences ego death (the loss of his brother/sister/doppelganger), accepts what was once seen as his competition as a brother (Brendan), forgives the sins of his father and realizes he is capable of committing equal if not worse evils (confrontations at the climax), sacrifices his own selfish life goals to support others (his own fatherhood), learns to love the woman from his past as a human being rather than just a sex object, turns wine to water (sobriety), breaks the cycle of the Ubermensch (as the flashback in Young Adulterer, he is dancing with Ione in a circle, at the end of CL, they are no longer moving in a circle), and let's go of the past (switch to present tense at the end). The band playing is obviously end credit music for the story. 

The whole story is a horror story about my fear that art is artifice,  the product of egomania, and that we should be appreciating divine/natural creations in life rather than playing god by making our own second(or in my case, fourth) rate reflections upon reality. It's a musing about, what do we need artists for if God exists? What use are role models when there is Jesus? What use is fiction when we have The Bible? It draws from more than Western religion but I only cite Christian sources theologically. I work like Jodorowsky. I was born in a Christian area, so, I work using the tools around me. There's also concepts like the shadow self, numerology, a literal pagan sacrificial ritual, aggressive nihilism/atheism, and other things written therein but they're used to add chaos to the narrative and confuse him whereas Christian archetypes are presented as the solution. I'm OCD, so, I need some larger framework contextualizing life in order to accept it. If there's no Author to our story or no overarching narrative, that's too great a psychological horror for someone like me. If you want to see it as a massive cope for my anxiety/OCD, I disagree but I also think that is a valid perspective. 

So, yeah, not a break-up book or one particularly concerned with romance much at all. It's a journey from chaos to finding theological order and from the top of that mountain, evaluating this metaphysical landscape and wondering where one's place is in it. The narrator learns to accept others but his potential for self-love is still conditional. It's a story of baptism.