Come sail your ships around me
And burn your bridges down
We make a little history, baby
Every time you come around
Perhaps that is the nature of love. It is simply too large for a tool like language.
We talk about finding ourselves. Knowing our boundaries. Standing by ourselves. Knowing who we are.
All important.
But then, sometimes, someone enters our life and something entirely different happens.
The boundaries blur.
The self falls silent.
The ego, that constant voice forever defining me as me and you as you, falls quiet for a moment.
What remains is the body, awareness, scent, skin, breathing, laughter, tears, sweat and that strange feeling that two people are no longer two.
I have sometimes wondered:
Can flames merge?
If two flames flow together, neither disappears. It simply becomes harder to say where one ends and the other begins.
Perhaps love is the closest we come to that experience.
Then it ends
There is something particular about the end of a relationship that has had this depth.
There can be many good reasons for it.
They can be logical. Sensible. Necessary.
You can look at the relationship and know it was not meant to continue.
Yet something in you remembers the fire.
Perhaps you do not only miss the person.
Perhaps you miss who you were with them.
The way the self could disappear.
Being seen.
Being vulnerable.
Being so close to another person that it no longer mattered where you yourself ended.
And that is where the longing sometimes becomes so deep.
Not necessarily because you believe the relationship should begin again.
But because the soul remembers what it was like to be a flame that had briefly forgotten where it ended.
The wounds are real
Love can hurt.
Relationships can end badly.
We can say and do things to people we love that leave real wounds.
Some heal.
Others become scars.
And perhaps that is one reason we begin to protect ourselves.
We tell ourselves we will never give so much again.
Never trust so much.
Never open our hearts completely.
We think we are learning from experience.
But sometimes we are simply afraid.
Gilding the broken pieces
The Japanese have a concept called kintsugi.
A broken object is not hidden or made to look as though it had never broken. The cracks are made visible and gilded.
The break becomes part of the story.
Not a flaw to hide.
Perhaps we need to learn something similar with the heart.
Not to hide the wounds.
Not to deny them.
Not to pretend they do not matter.
But not to let them become a reason to close our hearts either.
We can gild the broken pieces.
We can say:
This hurt me.
This cost me tears.
This left a scar.
But I do not regret having loved.
Amor fati
Nietzsche used the term amor fati.
To love one's fate.
Not merely to accept life as it turned out.
But not to reject your life because of what it cost.
To me, there is a great difference between saying:
“I accept that this happened.”
and:
“I love my life with this in it.”
Because nothing in life truly belongs to us.
Not time.
Not people.
Not love.
Not life itself.
We are given all of it only for a while.
And perhaps our suffering is sometimes greatest when we confuse being allowed to experience something with owning it.
We can love another person with all our heart without owning them.
We can be given the chance to share a life with someone without being entitled to have it last forever.
We can lose.
And still give thanks.
I would do it again
I have lost people I love.
I have loved people who are no longer part of my life in the same way as before.
I know the longing.
I know the wounds.
I know what it costs to open your heart and then lose what you thought had become part of you.
But I have also learned something.
Gratitude can live alongside grief.
I do not have to choose.
I can miss someone and be grateful at the same time.
I can wish I had been given more time and still be grateful for the time I had.
I can carry the scars and still love what gave them to me.
And if I stood at the beginning again, knowing how the story ended, knowing about the sweat, the tears, the loss and the wounds to my heart, I know I would do it all again.
Not because the pain was worth it.
But because the love was.
Perhaps that is the courage in love.
Not the belief that it will last forever.
Not the promise that we will never be hurt.
But this:
I know I could lose you.
I know it will hurt.
I know what love can cost.
But I'm gonna love you anyway.
We do not have to be afraid to love.
We know what it costs.
Sweat.
Tears.
Wounds.
Loss.
Then we gild the broken pieces.
Love again.
And give thanks for life. Come loose your dogs upon me
And let your hair hang down
You are a little mystery to me
Every time you come around