When Love Is Gone

Ah, when to the heart of man was it ever less than a treason to go with the drift of things to yield with a grace to reason and bow and accept at the end of a love or a season. - Robert Frost

WHAT happens when love dies? When love fades away and leaves the heart torn to shreds? When it runs out of steam and furtively flies out the window?

The world ends. The sun stops shining. The sea stops rushing to shore. Sleep won’t come. The tears won’t dry up. Breathing is difficult. Life sucks. Totally.

When love dies, nothing else matters but the pain we feel inside, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. Our whole being is tattered into a million bits and pieces, like glass shards piercing malleable flesh or sticks and stones breaking brittle bones. And we die a million deaths, as well.

We wrap ourselves in a jarring web of excruciating emotions – anger, despair, self-pity, denial, hatred, jealousy, misery, resentment, bitterness – name it, nothing but the darkest thoughts and feelings inhabit the innermost sanctum of our hopelessly broken existence. We stumble into long spells of weeping and gnashing, and take to the pill or the bottle to make us fall into liberating slumber.

Why did it happen? How could it happen? What went wrong? Where did it all go? Who’s to blame? The questions come like heavy lashes to the psyche, inflicting more soreness to a bleeding gash, heaping more cruelty to a badly battered wound. And the answers never come; they just lay there rooted at the core of our humanity – festering, blistering, burning our fragile egos at the stake.

We sink deeper and deeper into an abyss of our own making. We float in limbo made horrible by our own irrational creation. Logic deserts us, and reason takes a wrong turn. Sanity goes over the edge, and levity becomes a strange word. What if everything spins completely out of control? What if the spirit succumbs, and the only option that dwells in the feeble mind is the painless, spineless way out…

Would it be worth it? Would one person be worth all the aggravation? Why… are they cast in precious, irreplaceable stone? Do they ride on golden chariots and walk the earth in purple robes? So what if they are, if they do?

The trouble with loving someone is that we put them on a pedestal. We make them the be-all of our days and nights that they shouldn’t be. We treat them like the ruler of our lives that they aren’t supposed to be. We take them into our world unconditionally; and when it ends all too suddenly, everything around us crumbles. We fall apart, we drift away, we go astray, we refuse to go on living.

Worse, we blame other people for the madness that we ourselves commit. We point accusing fingers at those whom we perceive to have aggrieved us. We plant the seeds of rancor in our utterly vengeful hearts. We can’t deal with the fact that, if it was a game, we lost it – deservedly or not. And even if others will commiserate with us, they will never be able to fill the enormous void within. Not in a million years.

But then again, maybe it was bound to happen. Maybe it was written in the stars that they were not the right person for us. Maybe someone out there waits somewhere – someone more engaging, still flawed but definitely less aggravating and worthier of our trust. Who knows?

So one fine day, common sense returns and we snap out of it. The rain has stopped. The storm has passed. Look at all the colors now, the sun is out at last. A new song plays in our head. The dark bubble shrouding us has burst. The load is off our chest. We can breathe again.

We forgive, and ask for forgiveness, one way or another. Then we try hard to forget, and to move on. Because love does not keep a record of wrongs. It is patient and kind and is happy with the truth. It does not forever reside in achy, breaky, thorny places. It seeks a new expression in its own unhurried moment; an altogether different level, however one looks at it, this time freer and more meaningful. A tad less vexing and tiresome, a bit more spirited and at ease, gradually nurturing and enriching the soul.

Pain, though, is a necessary evil. It inures us to the possibility of being messed up anew, of committing the same mistakes over and over. Love’s labors make us learn a thing or two about facing up to aggression and hurt, of coping and surviving and emerging out of it in one piece; about thinking while feeling, and not letting pride get in the way of emancipating all the heaviness and spite stifled deep inside.

When love goes, it comes back again and again to turn our lives upside down, inside out – like a fierce cycle of hits and misses, trials and errors, twists and turns, comings and goings, to and fro, hither and thither, yonder and further away. It may take years, or a lifetime, to get over one hump after another – but does it matter? Sooner or later, we might find what we’re looking for – or we might not – but in the final analysis, we are definitely better off for having loved and lost than never having loved at all.