Part 1: Burnin’ Love
The Setting
I sit down by the large, Baroque-style windows of the century-old tea shop. Outside, the evening is casting a gloomy shadow of a looming storm and soon, darkness will regain its throne. I pick up the menu. The corners are crumpled and the pages are growing yellow from the flow of time that has passed and the slow, cruel hand of time that will be passing by. I doubt that another thousand years will fly through the Baroque-style windows, and I will always be here. Solitude will always be here.
– Burnin’ Love, Thanh Dinh
“Love, Anyways” started as a short story at first. It was a pebble thrown into the lake; just so happened that the lake was deep, and the ripple kept spreading farther. By the end, when I looked up, the water had already formed a tidal wave.
To talk about Burnin’ Love, I must turn over the years, the months, and the dates of my lost youth. The scene in the tea shop, for example, was once a reality for me. Sadly, the shop isn’t there anymore. To live is to accept grudgingly that we are losing everything as the years go by, and gaining something in return.
It was in that tea shop that I met the actor I admired. Admittedly, I have never talked to him for more than five seconds. I did ask for his signature, and I doubt if he remembered me. This goes to prove how an active imagination is a vital necessity for a writer.
And also, a lover.
The Inspiration
I loved him, in the sense that I loved the idea of loving him. There’s a sense of loving the ideal and loving the person behind it. In this short story, Burnin’ Love, that idea is portrayed very clearly. The girl, though she confessed her love madly, almost obsessively, there’s a foggy sense behind her ambiguity. A question rings from the tea master to the keen readers: Does she truly love the actor, or does she only love the idea she has of him?
Did he ever feel lonely? I asked him once, twice, or many times. He shook his head, accepting the defeat, saying he couldn’t go on fighting a rebellion where there would be no victor in the end. He was fine because he had acting. I wondered if he ever heard my heart shatter when he talked that way.
Did I want him to feel lonely? He asked me in turn. His eyes were like two mirrors reflecting my black soul.
“Yes,” I replied, “because at least then you will need me.” He waved my pessimism away, saying that there would come a day when I wouldn’t need him or anyone to live happily.
-Burnin’ Love, Thanh Dinh
The Meaning
Evidently, this is a love built from necessity. She wants him out of her sheer desperation. This is a form of unrequited love with the obstinacy of youth. What she wants isn’t happiness or the fruit of a shared intimacy–she wants to be needed, to be desired, to be the only one.
Her love is an obsession. And the actor isn’t falling for that.
To many readers, the ending won’t justify the start. And I will oblige to agree. Not many stories have a grandiose ending. Some suffer a mediocre one. Others settle for less. But the lukewarm, bland ending of Burnin’ Love is there for a purpose. I write it with a thought in mind: the protagonist needs to grow, and as with all things, growing up means cutting the most tender part off. It will hurt, and it is devastating.
But she realizes then, as she leaves the tea shop, she survives the whole show. She chooses the living. Whatever needed to happen, has happened, and the protagonist chose the love that destroyed her. She revered it, burned with it, bore the scars, and the long wait for the man that would never come again has finally ended her last hope.
The Conclusion
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
However, she chooses to go on. The protagonist chooses the spring. And maybe, the next time, when the actor comes back, not in her life, but on his stage, she will be strong enough to face him as she is. The ideal will be gone, and they will see each other as the naked humans that they are.
The thing with Burnin’ Love is, I never wanted to write it as a love story. I wanted it to tell the tale of a love that will transcend all labels, that love doesn’t need to fit a mold.
I have known you for my whole life and half of it has been spent chasing after the ghosts you made. And yet, how much solitude can a shoulder hold?
-Burnin’ Love, Thanh Dinh
Mistaking desperation and loneliness for the warmth of love. Thinking that love is the same as idealism. Confusing idealism for eternal happiness. It’s a cycle we choose to trap ourselves inside. And it’s also the narrow hope that makes us all so human at heart.
Next up in the series: In the Box