Returned To Sender

I can’t help wondering: what happens to the love, the kind that never gets to the people it was so earnestly meant for? Sometimes there’s a reason and sometimes there isn’t: they weren’t paying attention or they didn’t understand what would be required, or they just plain weren’t interested, they just plain didn’t want it, or at least not from me. I know I don’t have it anymore, that love—which I imagine as a sort of soft golden dust that sprinkles softly from your skin every minute of every day, when you’re right in the middle of it—but if it’s not with me and it’s not with any of those people, what happened to it and where did it go?

Now that I have lost so so so many I’ve loved, I’m in the strangely uncomfortable position of being able to confirm that the best thing about all that is, of course, the worst thing. The thing that everyone tells you and that you never want to believe and that ends up being the absolute truth: you get over it. It just takes time. It gets better—but the only way it can get better is for the thing you swear never will happen to happen, after all. You have to lose that person in your heart, completely. No more thinking about the good times or smiling wistfully to yourself when you hear a certain song. No more even being grateful that they were in your life for just a little time. It doesn’t happen when you want it to, of course, when you’re laying there dry-eyed and shell-shocked in your empty bed, wishing that you could just fall asleep and wake up when you don’t care anymore, when you’d give anything to anyone not to care, ever again, about anything. No, no, oh no. No, you don’t lose the person in your heart then, of course not, not when it would be useful.

It takes a while. First the edges blur—the color of the lagoon in Samoa, the first train trip down to Rome, the giddy feeling you got when you talked about him to your unbelieving friends. Then, once you’ve broken the news to those same friends who still can’t believe it, and cried your all crying, once you’ve deleted all the contacts and tried to divest yourself of the big stupid hopeful dreams—it just becomes a story. It just something that happened, to you apparently. I mean, you have the documentation around, somewhere; there are pictures and emails and whatnot, and eventually it’s not a big deal. You don’t have to stop yourself from looking through them in moments of weakness, in moments of sadness so complete that it sucks the air right out of your lungs. It never, or almost never, occurs to you to do so. You get to where you can talk about it casually, tell it like any of your other stories: you can roll your eyes and shrug your shoulders at the right moments, you can say whatever words you want. It stops mattering, or at least mattering so much, because you’ve arranged your life in such a way that could never include him. The context has changed and you’ve changed with it, and one day you wake up and that’s it, that’s the end of it. That’s how you know you’re done.

(Just because you’re done, of course, doesn’t mean you’ll be anything else, or feel anything else. I mean it doesn’t mean that now you’ve done your time that you’re going to win the game, to extent that there is a game, and that you can win it—to that you’re even playing the game. You may have to just settle for being done, for being generally okay).

So that’s all fine, that’s all perfectly acceptable, that’s all just the way it goes, but it doesn’t answer my real question: what happens, what happened to the love? Not theirs for me, but mine for them, lost and gone forever?

What I hope is that someone gets it, somewhere. If the person for whom it was meant didn’t take it or left it somewhere or just plain turned away from it, I hope that it wasn’t, in fact, Returned To Sender, but that it shimmered and shivered on to someone who needed it without their ever being aware that it was mine, once upon a time and long long ago.