Fifteen Days Later
22.02.01
Lost Love exercises our minds like nothing else. Unrequited love glows with a light golden hope; lost love is dark grey bitter with the pain of confirmation. All that you feared, all that held you back has come true despite all caution. Wary of loss you left unsaid what, well, would probably have been best left unsaid anyway, but the acid cut of it is that it doesn’t matter. No more. Not any more. Past. Done. Dead.
Lost Love fantasies are no longer alive, they deal with death, the coup de grâce – lost love returns to beg and you are strong enough to reject. Please God for the day that strength comes. Lost love passes in the street and your heart doesn’t turn over. You sleep and your traitor brain dreams of normal, everyday life together and you do not wake and chide yourself back to real life with more than a sigh of fond exasperation. Revenge is that you will be stronger than them, stronger than this pain, that you will Move On, that everything you touch and taste is not coloured by the reminder of the happiness you once had that you thought was the light that filled the world from edge to edge, was the food you ate and the sleep that refreshed. The reminder that this is another thing you can’t have.
It’s every waking and sleeping thought – idle moments filled with the longing for flesh on flesh for the mere comfort of being close. A kiss. That’s all I want. A kiss to fill my day like it used to. Oh, it used to. I write without passion now, words shaped by a hot, heavy, weary – disgust is the only word that fits. Disgust with what or whom I’m not exactly sure. Is my life going to be coloured by contempt from now on? Wealthy with happiness, I was generous; will I now hoard my smiles, cramping on my face, twisting my soul, my purpose? I am barren, blasted by incomprehensible forces of good-turned-bad. Lust, need, light, other people’s laughter. I feel like I can’t bear them – they weigh on my skin. They chafe. Oh, they do.
Now personal, now particular. More than anything I think it might be arrogance surprised. You don’t want me?! For the first time in my life I gave my whole soul; I held it up, a soft, shining light and it wasn’t enough. How you must grudge the time and money and energy you spent pandering to my delusion. But you say you don’t regret. I am still in shock – I have all the symptoms, not least the incredulity. That I’ll wake up. That it’ll be all right. That my mother will make it better. Oh, that’s right...
Staggered by my incompetence – I was so wrong. I thought your movements, your whole self, spoke of love, talked the same incandescent language as I did. And you say it’s love, but not the right way. And you say you desire me, but – what – not enough? You’ll miss me and you hate to lose me. I made you feel too much, but you didn’t understand the violence of my tears, the enormity of my pain: "I’m not worth this." Is that it – you couldn’t cope with someone who was starting to change your iron-clad view of yourself? I wonder what it’s like to have given up hope only to be given it, shown what that might mean, if only you’d open up your soul. Tear open your skin to fit the hope inside – that hurts, the opening; who knows what this new tenderness would mean: a weakness? Who knows if it’ll leave a scar, if it’ll hurt, if changing is too much? Were you so in love with being a – what – a fucking spinster that you rejected what we had, were starting to have, could have had?
The monstrous arrogance of you amazes me – the you I thought I knew would never do this. Ask me for comfort from the pain of hurting me. Kiss and caress me. Ask for everything you want from Us, but never let me ask for what I want.
Or maybe I never knew you; this is all part of my revenge fantasy: that I’m better than you. That I know you better than you know yourself; that I’m more honest than you. And who know what any of it really means, anyway.
I need time, and friends, and high-calorie carbohydrates. Time is the killer, though. I’ve never felt like this, never dreaded the time ahead like this. Anyone I’ve ever lost I’ve either initiated it or been prepared for it or not felt this much for. I’ve compared it to mourning the death of my mother because it feels like something’s died, but I knew she was going.
Yes, I’m bitter. Petty, immature and vengeful. Right now. But then I’ll be magnanimous and understanding, but then I’ll be sorrowful and rent, but comforted by the extremity of feeling. Bitterness isn’t me – isn’t what I’m about. I’m angry with you for changing me. I’m angry with you for buggering off to New Zealand and not having to face what you’ve done. Email is great that way – only say what you want to say. I’m angry when you write and I’m hurt when you don’t write – you’ve changed my world, turned everything on its head, torn my emotions away from me, taken my soul and then thrown it aside.
I’ll tell you why we venerate Lost Love – it’s not real. It’s dead: we can do what we like with it. The animated dead, clutching us, a pivot around which our life turns. Unrequited love isn’t real either, but it lives and breathes. It colours us with hope, it reminds us that we’re alive and other people matter. It comes along with us – we can carry it (maybe it carries us); it doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t stake us to the ground, bind us with a lengthening chain to the soft mire of deadness. Of dead hopes, of all the things we Could Have Been.
I have to break the chain. I don’t want to break the chain, which is why I’m sick with love. I chain myself with lost love, because it’s my only way of feeling the love I lost. Breaking the chain – suddenly: snap! – is the only way out I can see because it’s still so short, but that will hurt. I need time to lengthen the chain, soften the links, to rust the regard, to soothe the fear, to find me a new focus. I will need to look to the land of the living, find a way to breathe again.
Until then, I will love and hate you, the you that has so swiftly become a theory, a concept, because a real person will hurt me. (And I can’t wreak my imagined revenges on the thought of a real person.) Until I find the strength to forget the feelings and remember it all truly, until it all becomes nostalgia, until the fear is gone. But I know where I’m going. I will break the chain. And I will return to the light.