12 months after starting it, I have finished my play, titled Finnish.
It shouldn't have taken me this long. It's only 85 or so pages of writing. But in parts, it is intense, and this has been an intense year. Such extremes of love and the questioning of love, self doubt that brought me to the edge of some very dark places because the person I love most... I had hurt her and she wanted to hurt me. She achieved that goal. I realised that I am, this late in life, still as lacking in self-confidence as I was as young boy. When I was a young boy, my self-confidence was destroyed. Unlike a lizard's tail, it seems your self-confidence never grows back. You cover up this lack of self-confidence late in life... you learn some tricks. But when it gets kicked out of you again, you realize that you are still that lonely little boy.
Writing this play was a coping mechanism. Writing this play was a way of trying to understand things. I really didn't do anything wrong. I loved outside of the accepted parameters of love maybe... meaning just that I love my friends. I have few friends, I am solitary man, but sometimes these random strangers break through and I find myself seeing these individuals fully, understanding them fully, accepting them fully, and loving them fully.
And that is what my play is about. It's about the nature of love and friendship. It's about can society accept alternative forms of love and friendship.
Can a 50 year old man have a beautiful friendship with a 25 or 30 year old woman without it being about sex or lust. This a valid question. It's also about the nature of love. What, exactly, is love, and how do we judge love. Maybe love can be pure, even though you are judging it from your world view. Just because you think love is about lust, it isn't necessarily so. Sometimes love is just about acceptance. You just accept them, and you embrace them, because you love them. Love is a mystery.
So I've finished a play about love. It's maybe the rawest thing I've ever written, and I tend to go for raw. I write to make myself cry or to laugh, and I have done both in writing this thing.
Just like in the closing of the third act of the play, I have no idea what happens next.
I'm on a little love adventure.