Love is Life

The familiar feeling struck again today, cutting through the haze of my thoughts and torturing the soft part of my brain with an overload of emotion. I closed in on myself, thinking dark thoughts, remembering bright memories; and dark memories. I wonder where it's all disappeared to, that potential that seemed so great at the time, but has now disintegrated into the wind, the way ancient skeletons crumble to dust. It seems so long ago, and in fact, it has been, but the loss of those feelings haunts worse than any ghost. Perhaps it's not the person I miss, but the feeling, the warmth that seemed to radiate from my life, outshining the dark cracks that have always run through me. It may not have looked like it, but I was happier then than I had ever been.

I try to keep my façade of confidence, whilst beneath the surface do battle The Things That Are, The Things That Were, and The Things Which May Never Be. Each face two fronts of battle; three entities struggling to find their truth - my struggle to find my truth. I found, as the battle drew on, that it will never truly stop, and I shall look for the truth, for hope in any place I can find: films, books, other people, the paranormal; after all, the true reason we read is to find the one character who is unmistakably ourselves, and to follow their journey, so we may know how our story ends before its conclusion. And all the while we have the same longings, the same fears, the same habits of mind, turning our world on its axis; some of us wait to find the one to shift our world on its poles, others of us merely want to know when it will stop its gentle revolution.

But somehow, through all the pain, through the war raging within ourselves, we find that sad place of desires that have never been fulfilled. These desires create a special kind of melancholy, reaching in and peeling back the layers of skin to expose our heart, reaching through the blood and the muscles and the tissue layers to expose something which should never see the light of day, though it yearns for it the same way a poverty ridden artist yearns for a paintbrush in his hand and a fresh canvas before him. It is more than desire; it is life. And life is composed of those small moments of delicacy, of intimacy, of love: the smell of a lover in the morning, the curve of their spine against your chest, the girth of their body in your arms, the way their hand touches yours, and the way they berate you with mirth in their eyes. Life is composed of those moments: you brushing their fringe from their eyes, they placing their hands on your hips and whispering in your ear, the way you kiss their neck, the way everything just fits between the two of you. Without such moments, we cannot claim that we have lived.

Yet, some of us travel without being blessed by such moments, and the self doubt creeps in and sets its dark roots in our most vulnerable place. Instead of love grows despair, and one day you wake up in the grip of pure panic, thinking that you may wake up alone for the rest of your life. Instead of joy in friends' happiness, twinges of jealousy taint everything, and you wonder what it is that keeps you from having what they possess with their own lovers. You wonder how you could be so repulsive to others. You despair that you may never find a person who shall love you, and whom you may love in return. The wounds are kept raw because they are constantly chaffed by the world; it seems you just rub the wrong way with them all. The best you can do is hope.