WHAT people call love between a man and a woman is a season…and if it is at its flowering, this season is a feast of greenery; at its waning, it is only a heap of rotting leaves.
The death of love is like the death of a loved person. It leaves behind the same grief, the same emptiness, the same refusal to accept the truth… even if you expected it and caused it, wanted it out of self-defense or sagacity. When it happens you feel mutilated, you feel as if you’re only left with one eye, one ear, one arm, one leg, one lung, half a brain and you do nothing but invoke the last half of yourself.
The person with you don’t even recall his faults, the torment he inflicted on your soul, the sufferings you went through on his account: the regret gives you the memory of a valuable treasure, in any case something whose merits largely exceed his demerits – nor it is a relief to understand that this represents an insult to logic, an affront to intelligence, and masochism attains psychiatric heights. You wasted a piece of existence that nothing and nobody can reimburse you – a love that languishes without remedy. You keep it and you try to heal it. That is why even if it is in a state of coma, you try to postpone when it will breathe its last breath: you detain it and you silently implore it to live one more day, one more hour, one more minute. That is why, even when it has stopped breathing, you hesitate to bury and in certain cases, you expect to resuscitate it…rise…walk!!
Then slowly it passes and within one moment we reach a stage. We reach the stage when it happens in a day in our lives, in the social or sentimental relations that cost too much grief…worn-down grief like it can remake what is worn out, you say with forced hopes, and even if you bleed to death…you wait. Even if precariousness of the relationship has frozen in an eternal wait for improvement, you postpone your decision, your impulse to cut what hangs from a thread…an episode that rips out the remains of your forced optimum… and act that erases the residue of your forced hope – something that makes you conclude: no, no, it is not sturdy thread…it is an extremely slender one…it practically doesn’t exist. Enough with patience, enough with hoping.
Then you stretch your hand and cut it: you who must make the choice.
You are irresolute and I am indomitable.
Epilogue
Why do some people experience enduring love (which lasts a lifetime) while others are only destined to love for a short time. Why are those who separate, either by choice or by fate, love after equated with joy, when it is everything as well. Devastation, balm, obsession, granting and receiving distorts, heals and excessive value and losing it again. It intoxicates, distorts and shames one. It is a recognition of what you are not but might. It sears and it heals. In fact, it can seem like truth.
Love is asked to carry intolerable burdens, not seen from outside. I’ve learned that love can be hard service, giving you all and maybe finding you all, like your glimpse of transcendence…or agreement. Love at any age takes everything you’ve got.
“Love tested by its indulgences to weakness, or its blindness to unworthiness can turn to scorn.” Anton Chekov said this and you wonder why love and hate are near each other. Opposite and alike, and interchangeable.
But hate is a burning poison that dehumanizes us. How can I be anything but appalled by it. I have hated and I know it is evil, but it is part of truth, even if I know well that hate is a consuming fire, poisoning every part of us that has to be met. But why moan over love and its humanity… the pain of losing good is the measure of its goodness.
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E-mail Mylah at [email protected].
