I canât help wondering: what happens to the love, the kind that never gets to the people it was so earnestly meant for? Sometimes thereâs a reason and sometimes there isnât: they werenât paying attention or they didnât understand what would be required, or they just plain werenât interested, they just plain didnât want it, or at least not from me. I know I donât have it anymore, that loveâwhich I imagine as a sort of soft golden dust that sprinkles softly from your skin every minute of every day, when youâre right in the middle of itâbut if itâs not with me and itâs not with any of those people, what happened to it and where did it go?
Now that I have lost so so so many Iâve loved, Iâm 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 betterâbut 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 doesnât happen when you want it to, of course, when youâre laying there dry-eyed and shell-shocked in your empty bed, wishing that you could just fall asleep and wake up when you donât care anymore, when youâd give anything to anyone not to care, ever again, about anything. No, no, oh no. No, you donât lose the person in your heart then, of course not, not when it would be useful.
It takes a while. First the edges blurâthe 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 youâve broken the news to those same friends who still canât believe it, and cried your all crying, once youâve deleted all the contacts and tried to divest yourself of the big stupid hopeful dreamsâit 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 itâs not a big deal. You donât 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 youâve arranged your life in such a way that could never include him. The context has changed and youâve changed with it, and one day you wake up and thatâs it, thatâs the end of it. Thatâs how you know youâre done.
(Just because youâre done, of course, doesnât mean youâll be anything else, or feel anything else. I mean it doesnât mean that now youâve done your time that youâre going to win the game, to extent that there is a game, and that you can win itâto that youâre even playing the game. You may have to just settle for being done, for being generally okay).
So thatâs all fine, thatâs all perfectly acceptable, that’s all just the way it goes, but it doesnât 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 didnât take it or left it somewhere or just plain turned away from it, I hope that it wasnât, 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.
Comments
7 responses to “Returned To Sender”
Oof.
That was a rough one.
Beautifully written. You’ve described something that everyone has been through in a new and thoughtful way. What *does* happen to the love? Well, I think love is never wasted, and love is never exhausted. As is evident from my love for you! xoxoxoxo
Oh, so beautiful.
Chiara, love is like the light……. you cannot store it, but you can certainly shine it around and it is “almost” always welcome, but, like all vital things, it can get to the point that it can be overwhelmingly TOO MUCH……….. blinding, if you will and therefore forcing you to close your eyes or look somewhere else, for something less intense, more sedate. After all, looking at the sun is not easy nor relaxing, but you can certainly enjoy and benefit from being exposed to that much light…. you ask, where does it go, after sunset… is it lost…??? And you hope that someone gets it, at least someone who needs it, anyway…… but this is a rethorical question and you know the answer perfectly well… the light stays with the sun, the only one capable of generating it in our planetary system, the rest of the bodies simply not large or good enough to produce heat and light, but merely capable of a pale reverberation of what they receive….simply unable to sustain your gaze…. and this disparity doesn’t necessarily mean your light will be forgotten, once gone….. it will be remembered, you can rest assured, for the light of a moon will not cause any burn, but will not comfort the shivering, nor lit any path, either…. so, it is the light of the sun the one destined to stay in our memory, because of its unique strength and warmth and the ones fortunate enough to have basked in it, although realizing their inability to shine back at par, are certainly not going to forget the light they could not sustain watching. This red dwarf wishes you a stray star will feel your powerful gravity and end up in a binary system….. that I would gladly salute with a super-nova feat….!!!!
You are a marvelously complex and fascinating woman.
Wow that was beautiful! Good to see you at the market briefly the other day.
This is lovely and sad, and I miss you. Kisses.