How To Learn To Love Again After Losing Everything

It’s when people awaken that part of your soul that the pain of real death kicks you, out of your sleep…

They remind you that you’re awake. That you have this capacity to love beyond your own understanding – beyond your own soul – beyond your own universe, all the way to deep-seated reasons unbeknownst even to you, because their existence resonates with you on a plane that seems almost inhuman.

That (im)perfect love burnt out like a sun that was never meant to last. To have known that kind of love is a gift. To have lost it was worse than being cursed.

It consumed me, burned me, gave me that warmth, that spark, that fire, that need for life like I’d never felt it before. And suddenly it burned out, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; all was cold. Utterly, bitterly cold. When you tried to fan the flame back, all that flew back in your face were ashes. Bitter, bitter ashes -because those once-flowing-honey-sweet feelings are now so lost to you that they scream in repugnance; denatured proteins of the soul – irrevocable.

How can I say it failed, if it was never meant to last? I was Icarus – I flew too close to the sun. I experienced the utmost bliss only to lose it because I allowed myself to love too freely, too quickly, too deeply, too honestly, too lovingly. It felt too good and I couldn’t see the end was near.

And I buried myself a long time ago. I ceased to exist to the world – even to myself.

But I look at that face and I see in it all the dreams I could have lived out, contained in one person whose face to me is so beautiful that it frustrates me when it sleeps because it’s inaccessible – but it allows observation. I find myself looking at this face and not seeing it at all – but rather seeing them. It. That thing I like. That thing whose soul touches me even when we’re not touching.

It’s like a philote. The strands swing and flow and reach out to their likenesses and one day the strands, tentacle-like, will somehow, by some supreme chance, graze each other and electrify the others’ world. Forever changed by one another. And they realize this. They become deeper intertwined. The more they realize their likeness, their necessity, their (im)perfection, they become deeper-knit. They draw themselves closer despite the universe telling them to come apart. And the longer they spend together, they more they influence each other. The more one affects the other. From the way (s)he moves or breathes or sleeps or the way their eyes gaze into yours in nervously irreconcilable wants, needs, desires, all things of consciousness and chaos, it moves the deepest parts of you that you wish they never made you feel.

Because up until this point you’d been dead. Cold, lifeless. You’d given up, grieved, mourned, accepted your loss, buried yourself, your soul, your memory. And they made you feel a pulse.