My love,
I’ve been thinking of you while I navigate the world with a broken heart.
We are phenomena – a combination of processes, electrical signals and chemical reactions combined into conscious creatures in a constant state of negotiation with the reality we inhabit utilising our limited tools of perception. We are animals who name ourselves. We are weird, scared, lonely, lovely little miracles.
Our ancient drives are self-reproduction as a battle cry against mortality which manifests as self-obsession and a desire for confirmation of our own existence. And so we seek love with the hopes that it will mean permanence and protection from the only constant which is change. But love, to our horror, has the very opposite effect of comforting us because love challenges us. The process of opening to another changes us. Our consciousness, our habits of thought, the phenomena of “us” becomes permanently altered by the phenomena of “them”. It’s like the act of intimate contact is a merging of atoms and electricity so that parts of them float within us for the rest of our short and hard and beautiful lives.
Intimacy is a coalescence, a vulnerability, an invitation of other into self. It is an act of enthusiastic and terrifying consent – “I love you, please come inside” and once we let someone inside, the shape of us, whatever that is, is forever altered. Their colours and textures permanently tint and transform our own in ways that ensnare us in thrilled awe.
You changed me and you will remain inside me until this thing I call myself falls apart.
Contact between self and other is never easy. In our desperation for comfort and stability in a reality where the only truth – impermanence – terrifies us, we desperately cling to our fixed ideas, our fixed identities, because this comforts us. Love, that abject state of gaping wide open, confronts us to the core.
Loving you scared me like the realisation of the vastness of space and the finality of death.
When two conscious beings collide, the friction, the tension of phenomena meeting phenomena is alchemical, a birthing of alien landscapes sparkling with crystalline creations, populated with strange new flora and fauna and marred occasionally with sites where the act of impact has become violent. Blackened landscapes caused by natural disasters, forest fires and comet collisions.
When two phenomena learn to co-exist and navigate their collisions with grace, the blackened landscapes become places of rejuvenation and renewal, together you establish and nurture delicate new life forms in the landscape named “hurt” and the plant life is stories about regained trust and personal growth.
Loving you made me feel alive and brilliant and free, like the beauty of the desert sand dunes we ran across, like the stars we looked sideways into, like the filthy way that we fucked among the flies. It painted new colours and patterns on my skin, it made me beautiful. When you whispered “I’ve got you, babe” I fell into those words with the grateful, unbelievable softness of trust.
But then there are the less natural disasters. The nuclear reactions. And a nuclear reaction is different. This is when consciousness becomes aggravated at the discomfort of difference and begins to act in violent defensiveness, sending out antibodies to destroy the other within its system using whatever means necessary. Love’s immune system attacks itself and the self sickens, the landscape becomes toxic. This is neurosis, violence and abuse and it is destructive, it is dangerous.
Without maintenance and care, what rapidly results is a landscape devastated beyond two human animal’s capacities to repair. This landscape becomes expansive and blackened, the poison begins to intrude even on the beautiful spaces and the life within it becomes decrepit. This is a terrible place for an animal to find itself in and so sometimes, in a desperate act of self-preservation, a creature must tear itself from its entanglement from another.
Loving you broke my heart too many times. Loving you nearly broke me. I wish you’d accepted just how unhealthy, how cruel, how violent your words, unquestioned thoughts, assumptions and habits were. I wish you’d valued softness over hardness, kindness over rightness, maybe then we’d have stood a chance, maybe then I could have mustered the bravery to try and trust you again… but it’s too late now. Our time has passed into the past and I’m slowly letting go of my anger and sorrow and regret.
Slowly. Sometimes I still burn with a violent fury at you for ever making me feel so small. Sometimes it still really hurts and yes, I blame you for things falling apart. But I’m letting go of that hurt. Slowly.
When a separation happens, a rift, a tearing apart, often suddenly and violently… it leaves us heartbroken. Heartbreak is… it is the feeling of your skin and insides dragging behind you in tendrils that float and ache and hopelessly reach for the other being they had attached themselves to who is no longer there. Heartbreak is a howl of despair.
I’m sorry I left, my love. I will be forever sorry about that because I thought, I truly thought… I thought we would watch one another grow old. But I’ve had to let go of that dream. Nothing has ever been harder. Nothing.
For a while this violent disentanglement leaves us broken and shut down, for some time we close off and vow never to open ourselves up ever again. We become a small, bitter, angry, sad, closed consciousness who doubles down on the defensive behaviours that cause our perceptions to narrow, our connections with the world to vanish and so we become deeply lonely creatures.
But my love, it doesn’t have to be that way. If we open to our pain, our hurt, our deep and agonising vulnerability, we realise that though we have lost the thing we had, we had it once and now it is forever entangled within the phenomena of the thing that we call ourselves. And we can access that and we can carry it into the future to make our world more beautiful.
It will never be the same because nothing in the history of existence ever is. But each thing that is now comes from the thing that was before. And so… you will forever be part of the big story I tell myself about myself. The good parts and the bad, I’ll wear them both, I’ll honour my love and my broken heart and I hope you will too.
Love is the stuff of braveness and openness and vulnerability and metamorphosis. Joy and pain are inseparable truths. The other truth is change. But when I loved you, I loved you forever.
My heart is broken but it is also shifting into new spaces and shapes. And as I move through my small life and realise that even with you gone, you have left your mark, I am utterly grateful for the collision of us because I love the textures and tones of what I am now. As dangerous as you were for me… you were magical too.
You can never have something back once it has passed. But the fact of it ever existing is a miracle and that is the most beautiful and comforting truth I know.
Thank you for daring to love me. We were so brave to try.