I can’t sleep. So I write.
I haven’t written to myself in a long time; my heart tells me that this is the morning to do so. I am tired of staring at the ghosts on my ceiling. They float around my head when I am trying to sleep but can’t, so I watch them play instead.
I am troubled because I just realized that we are always in the process of losing the things we love. It’s been a couple days since Valentine’s Day, and the piece that I wrote previous to this one was dated exactly a year ago. It was based upon a conversation that took place a very long time ago, in another lifetime perhaps. I was asked by a man whom I was in love with at the time (and who loved me at the time), how did I know that I was in love with him? How was this time different? How was he special? I pondered for a long time that night, and I sat down and wrote and rewrote, and scribbled and cried, and poured my emotions out on a piece of paper. This piece of paper became many pieces of paper, and that one night eventually became many nights, stretched out over a period of years, stretched out over periods of various versions of me, each doomed to an existence more short-lived than the one preceding. That passage was the cumulative result of a little girl who loved and lost, and loved and lost, and loved and lost, over and over and over again, until she had nothing left for herself but the shell of her own heart. It is a painful realization to bear that the only being who will ever completely empathize with the tragedy of this finality is her and her alone. Me.
The point is, sometimes I feel like I don’t really know what love is. Sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t have the consciousness to say it to another human being. How in the world does anyone learn to love another person for their whole heart when we’re so concerned with our own hearts getting broken in the process? We’re all just struggling in learning to love. Nobody really has any idea what they’re doing with theirs or anybody’s heart. And then we lose the things we love. We lose the things we love in such heartbreaking ways. Whether it be death or inevitabilily, it’s always heartbreaking. Especially when it comes quietly. Loss in any of its manifestations causes us to grow and stretch into a greater version of ourselves. Life breaks each of us over and over again, and with any luck, we become stronger in the places that were broken. Letting go of things or people that are hurting us is painful but necessary, and sometimes it is so necessary that the act itself is painful. Just remember that it’s not goodbye. You take the best parts of those you have loved with you, and you carry them with you always. You learn to live with what you lose, and that’s what is meant to be.
Eventually some of us may realize that the person that we need to let go of is ourselves. That’s precisely where I am right now. I am in the process of giving everything up to get it all back.
I hope I find that little girl again, I really do.
(via)
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