Life or Love

It has been seven years since I last kissed him.  Seven years and I never see him anymore.  I have seen him once in 5 years and still I dream about him every night.  I tell people it took me years to get over him.  What I don’t tell them is that I am not over him yet.  It took me several years to play the part of being normal again, to discover ways to have happy moments but I am not over him.  I think about him every day.  When I hear love songs it is him I think about.  I dream about us in other lifetimes where we are different people, with different lives, but we are still the same and we still love each other. 

I went away for a couple of years, to the other side of the world and experienced many happy, beautiful moments, but still I did not forget him.  Still I dreamed about him.  Still I missed him and felt sad about knowing he is living in the world without me.  I would say that I wonder if he feels the same, but the truth is I don’t wonder, I know.  I know he still thinks about me and he still loves me.  You would think I would just say to hell with it then and get him back, but it is not as simple as that.  There is love and there is life and the two are different.  In some cases to love is to give up life and to live life is to give up love.  Sometimes it is a choice between the two and once you have made that choice, the rest of your life is changed by it.  It is always in you and changes the way you think and react about everything.  It means you go through your life knowing that you have lost something, a part of yourself that you will never get back, but that still exists and breaths and moves and is.  That is the worst part of it, the fact that it is still alive and out there and existing without you. 

At times that is all I feel I am doing, existing, going through the motions of getting up in the morning and going to work and smiling and talking and trying my best to live a good decent life in the hope that one day I will stop missing him.  So that one day I will be me on my own without him in my dreams and my thoughts.  I don’t think bad thoughts about him.  I don’t hate him.  I want him to be happy and to have a good life, but I know he is not happy.  I have to believe in other things.  I have to believe that the dreams are not dreams, but they are memories of other lives we have lived together and will live again where we can be together and live good happy lives.  Until then what can I do? 

He is not a bad person.   He did not hurt me on purpose in any way.  He would have done anything for me, anything he could do except what I needed him to do.  That is the way it is with people.  They can’t be what you want them to be, they can’t change for you and you have to let them go and you pay for that with the rest of your life.  We met young, we were both messed up and rebellious and we made each other both better and worse.  It was a love affair that consumed us both.  They say love is like taking a leap of faith and jumping off a cliff holding someone’s hand.  There is some truth in that, but what they don’t say is that not everyone lands together on the ground.  You fall through the air for years, not touching anything but him, not the ground, not the sky, not other people, just the two of you falling through the air.  You might even float there for a while and think that you can fly, but then you realise you cannot defy the laws of the world forever, it pulls you down.  It pulls you down to the ground because as a human you don’t belong in the air, you belong on the ground and you have to land.  I landed before him and had to leave him up there.  He landed somewhere else.  Up there, existing, nearby but out of reach and I am on my own waiting.

It was only meant to be a bit of fun but we could not get enough of each other.  The first time I stayed, I stayed for three days.  I never wanted to sleep.  I wanted to be with him every second of every day and if we could we were.  My whole being was absorbed with him.  With talking to him, touching him, looking at him, being with him.  No one and nothing else existed to me anymore.  He was literally all I cared about.  I put all my everything into him and had nothing left for anyone else least of all for myself.  I was a body when he wasn’t there, nothing else.  On nights out with friends, I would sit in the toilet wishing I could get home to him.  When he was out or away I could do nothing with my mind except wish that he was back.  I wanted to disappear inside of him and never come back out.  I wanted to give myself up, forfeit my soul so that I could be inside with him.  It was completely insane.  I was desperate and pathetic.  I was never in any doubt that he loved me, but even that was not enough.  There was such a desire in me for his whole being that he could never have satisfied it.  He did not know what to do with me and sometimes would find me crying into the pillow unable to articulate what was wrong with me.  Yet still  he did not leave, he waited for me to recover and he loved me again and again and again and it was not enough. 

They say everything happens for a reason and until now I could never understand why all that happened the way it did.  A part of me wished he had been taken away from me, or he had cheated on me, or wronged me in some clean, final way so that I could just remove him from myself.  That was not how it happened.  I had to leave him.  I had to.  I had gotten to the lowest I could go.  I was ceasing to be.  I was nothing to anyone.  I was in darkness.  I was weak and I hated myself.  I always thought it was just that everyone needs to fall in love and experience it but now I think I had to lose myself completely. I had to give it all away so that I could build myself again, become a whole new person.  I had to take a good look at all the rubbish that was inside of me and strip it away and fill myself with better things, with goodness, with faith, with hope and with understanding.  I found a way to believe in the world again, a point to it all.

Yet still he exists with that part of me inside of him.  Did I leave him wandering around the world with all the bad I had inside of me?  Perhaps not all of the bad, there is still some bad inside of me.  I still believe that one day we will both die and be born again and we will be together.  It is a comfort to me.   It keeps me going because I want us both to be better in the next life.  If I am good and kind and I get through this life helping and not hurting others, I will be born again in a better life and so will he and if he is not better, in the next life I will be strong enough to help him, to make him better.  I will have love and faith enough for us both and we will live and love together and we will do this life after life and all this suffering of this one life will be worth it.  I will never let him go, not really, but I will pretend.

I am not going to give up with this life though.  I cannot explain why, but I can’t.  I have to keep going.  I am not going to sink into depression and blind myself with drink and drugs and give up on it all because I have to keep going.  I will just keep going carrying this thing around with me for as long as I have to.  I will keep searching for something else, something to make it right, something to make it all ok.  I will try and be good and be appreciative of the time I have here, to learn, to love to experience life and everything in it.  I will get up in the morning and I will get ready and I will go to the gym and then I will go to work and I will speak to people and smile and laugh at jokes and listen to problems and give advice and listen to advice and eat and drink and dance and love and live life the way you are supposed to.  I will do it all, I will do it.  I will just always be a little bit broken, a little bit missing, but only a few people will notice and there will be nothing the people that notice can do for me.