Some Love Is Worth Remembering

Twenty20 / joekentwhitson
Twenty20 / joekentwhitson

Sometimes the love you lose makes you understand its existence because you realize it wasn’t love that you lost, it was a person. And maybe what we fail to understand is how love can never really be lost, and even when we think it is, we can remember it, and we can go back to it in our minds and think about how we felt when that love was more than just a memory.

And even if it is only in our thoughts, that love can be relived for just a moment. And while it may not be reality, it is the only thing we have to hold onto. Because some love is harder to let go of. Some love we may not even realize we carry with us. We feel the weight of it, but we can’t see it, and it attempts to hold us back when all we want to do is move forward. But maybe that love has to be able to move forward with us.

Some love is worth remembering because of how it made us feel, because of how it built us and broke us, and how all of that destruction made us learn something about ourselves. And it’s fascinating to see how we continued to live after we thought that love was gone.

But we thought wrong because we shouldn’t look at love as something that can be lost and found, but as a feeling that makes us feel alive when we have it. When we think love is lost we can only hope that we will find it again. And sometimes we go searching for love but instead we find ourselves.

In a way, losing makes us stronger because we have to learn to live without everything that has been lost. And we can’t magically erase the time when it was there, and we shouldn’t want to. Because your life isn’t a dry erase board, it’s a concrete sidewalk, and the cement is constantly wet, and people will walk through it and their footprints will remain. And every impression is a memory, and some of those memories are harder to look back on, but usually the ones we hate to remember are the ones that taught us the most valuable lesson.

And that’s the type of love and loss that makes us grow, that shapes us into the people we become. And maybe it is childish to think that everything happens for a reason, or if not childish, impractical, but when you think about it, nothing about love is practical.

We’re all looking for answers that may not exist, and maybe that’s why people tell us it’s best to let go, but I don’t think it’s harmful to remember the feelings you were holding onto, I think it’s harmful to hold onto the person. Because while holding onto a person can cause damage, remembering the way that person made you feel can serve as a reminder that you’re capable of feeling at all. We’re not numb to love, we’re scared to experience it again. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

Writer based in the Philadelphia area. Person who really loves her dog and watching cooking shows. Check out my writing on Thought Catalog and follow me on Facebook! Connect with me and submit your work on Collective World.

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