A Note On Love's End

This is something that is obviously very distant from the realm of my comfort zone, and that would probably go for the majority of the population and definitely people of my age group in today’s day. I’ve realized there’s nothing wrong with that, just because I feel this way/much and don’t see others voicing topics like this doesn’t mean it isn’t something I should share. I kind of  pride myself on being in touch with myself, so I figured it shouldn’t be something I keep hidden in concealment. This note probably requires multiple reads, and that’s coming from the author who even learns something new each time through. Concepts stack and mesh, offering a multitude of  perspectives. A rhetorical analysis should be enacted inevitably. Nothing here is science, this is written out of experience and intense reflection. I decided to leave little to interpretation by increasing the amount of description allocated to specific points so as to reach a broader audience. If this touches even one person, I will be fulfilled. The essence of writing is in its conveyance, its intention. If you do decide to read through the note’s entirety, I would actually love to hear your thoughts/arguments pertaining to anything written. It was written amid a heart wrench, each word  placed completely purposefully. Grammatical errors, intended. Organization? Scattered. This is raw. It was written quickly yet purely, but that’s what happens when a heart bleeds black ink. 

You’re dumbfounded or would at least like to think you are. Alone and in love, that’s  backwards. Words have run out, but only the spoken ones. It’s haunting instantly, overwhelming. Heartbreak ensues, but the issue lies in heartbreak’s necessity to endure reasoning or feelings. You wake up to nightmares that just days before you were calling dreams. You sit alongside a seeming embodiment of nothingness, hoping the other is grieving too, maybe even harder. Your heart is not beating on schedule, it’s completely off. It’s a wild feeling to be a prisoner of love, only capable of being freed by your now forgone confiner. You’re lying across tracks, and unless it’s your first  break, you know precisely how heavy and long this train is. And it’s not until you let the train hit that you’ll even give your soul a chance to come back and instill your flesh. You make playlists and you watch things that ensure your heart plummets truly, all the while keeping faith in the fact that there’s a trampoline at the bottom that the harder you hit, the higher it will propel you back to happiness. Life is rhythmic. You feel like you’re the one who knew what you had before you lost it, but you’re broken because you wonder if they knew exactly what they lost. Lost wouldn’t be the right word anymore, they knew exactly what they set free. You had pledged to never taste another lip, but now you don’t even have control of a single sense. You may start to lean towards the Poe side of love, now you’ll hear him with more than just your ears. Good for you. You’ll reach out to others who have more, or less to offer emotionally. Then you’ll find another potential lover that has more, or less to offer. The matter of more or less will be a decision you make with no blind eye if you’re careful. Is there a worse scar than a scathed heart? 

“You won’t find a heart like mine” is something you can rest assured of. They may not care, and they may not even need or miss it, and they may actually perceive the loss as a good thing, but it’s still true. You loved differently, everyone does, and at least for a while, they felt that, so that knowledge is there; nothing is engraved quite like a memory. This goes for any lover in any situation. Rest assured. 

You veraciously crave love, signs of adoration or even getting noticed, but then you remember that didn’t just start when the union ceased, or else it wouldn’t have ceased at all. The thing is, this heart is broken. You’ll walk around with it. It takes only a few words to reveal that truth, but without those words no one will know of the scathe because the only person that can read your eyes and silence is no longer there to do it. But you’ll carry on. The same way it’s only justifiable to walk around this planet chewing, is because of the existence of gum, it’s also only justifiable to walk around with random smiles and dizzied eyes because of love’s existence. Heartbreak is when the love is gone but you’re still chewing. Other people see how weird it is, but you won’t be able to stop until you get the taste out of your mouth. You think the only tool you have to describe yourself is language but that’s a lie. One picture of yourself in this time of grief and it’s clear, you’re bent, your heart is twisted, your soul laments. The things you do that you know they liked don’t matter anymore, they’re just things you do. You’ll walk around, and you’ll wear a smile no differently than another article of clothing. The smile is there, but you miss the smiles that hurt your cheeks, and the ones that froze in your mind because when you shared the moment, your eyes clinched shut. No one took a picture, but it’s imprinted neurologically. Now you see why people stress the difference between a house and a home. A home is no location, yet you know where it is. A home has no walls, but you know it’s safe. A home has no address, but you know its name. 

There’s a silence in relationships that is prevalent. I only say prevalent because I don’t have the words to truly describe these silent moments and refuse to try, in fear of coming short. It’s an intimacy. It’s like the space between each string of an instrument, there’s a silence. A silence you trust will be immortal. It’s a matter of mortality in the first place because it is such a living  presence, even in its obvious lack thereof. You trust so emphatically that a note will follow, some hymn, some breath, a twitch of an eye, right to left. You’re so close that looking at a different eye requires a look of a complete different direction. A different perspective of the same view, just another rabbit hole to the same soul, you’re abundantly content to take it. You miss the eye contact so much, that now it terrifies you. All of a sudden, you’re lost in abandonment of the one thing you had more trust in than anything. The loudest silence you ever felt, is now actually silent. The touch you watched your hand feel, just to add another sense to the interaction, can reach now for nothing, seeing even less. It’s a disparity of senses that have compiled, added with emotion to construct an exponentially built infatuation, that now ceases to even exist. Sickest part is that this  proves the infatuation. You spend a whole duration of a love fighting the temporary connotation of the word ‘infatuation’. You tell yourself infatuation may be supposed to be temporary, but that you feel nothing less than absolute, intense, growing infatuation, and you believe truly it won’t end. Then it does. You were infatuated, Webster’s was right, fuck.

 You literally start looking for flaws through a different lens. At first it feels as if you took the 3D glasses off at a 3D movie just in spite, in order to say the movie sucked. You know better, but you choose to know less, you open the gates of forgetfulness and understanding. Forgetting will happen but alleviating oneself of the ability and willingness to understand is a heartbreak in itself. All you needed was one excuse to stay, despite actually anything, and it wasn’t given, it was not awarded. Describe it how you like, but you were not perceived as worthy of a reason to stay; a hard truth. People give you reasons to stay on accident and on purpose. If they stop doing it on  purpose, that’s obvious. If they stop doing it on accident, there’s an imbalance. But then you realize no one actually told you that you had to wear those glasses. You know the movie appears better,  but you realize that if you don’t want to see the good in someone above the bad, that is not your obligation, that is a choice. You were hoping all along that your lover would notice that you happily chose not to wear the glasses, and appreciate that, and take it as a sign of your relentless commitment, but no. There is a silver lining. Once you’re done with the movie, and you’re done with the glasses, there’s a recycle bin outside the theater, that’s where you’ll leave the glasses, that’s where you’ll leave the lens, that’s where you’ll leave the benefit of the doubt. That’s also where you walk away, and nothing is blurry anymore, the world is clear and you realize you can see perfectly, how awesome is that? 

The fact that a broken heart is not a fear but a promise. You don’t fear having a broken heart, you fear when, it’s the fate of every lover. Everyone has heard that it’s better to have lost in love than to have never loved at all, and this is undeniable. To regret a sober high shared with someone you adored would be impossible. This concept is independent of time. Just because someone was in a relationship longer than you means nothing. Time is a construct, and there is no way to measure if a couple of 50 years ever reached the level of a month’s love between two young lovers. To compare relationships and love is purposeless and can lead to fabricated, self-induced disappointment. Disregarding young love’s logistical difficulties, there’s such an innate beauty in the phenomenon. Only problem with it is young lovers get caught up in being there partner’s “first” in as many ways as possible. This seems obvious, but the most important thing to be in love, is last. 

Another unfortunate concept is the separation between heart and mind. This worldwide casual discrepancy between heart and mind is a fallacy. Apart from being physiologically false, meaning the human heart obviously has no sense of feeling pertaining to love, people have separated emotions from intelligence. Emotional intelligence happens to be the most beautiful human trait, and a scarce one as well. Thinking and loving go hand in hand, they work on each other, mold each other, and create an aware and cognitive lover. It’s what allows us to be so in touch with our emotions, another seemingly lost trait. You realize the importance and requirement of an emotional and intellectual parallel between lovers. 

Love really is a selfish thing, and before you fight this, give it a second. What do people say when they are asked, “What do you like most about him/her?” After testing out this hypothesis, the answer is almost always, “he/she makes me happy,” or something along those lines. The thing is, that’s answering a question that wasn’t asked, but it’s become a publicly accepted answer. Another argument is to what extent partners confess they would do anything for the lover. But again, this is because of how they make you feel, and you know that anything to make them feel more love, will theoretically make them love you more. That is technically selfish. Now it’s important to understand this is not a negative in the love world. Within love’s bounds, anything done in the name and meaning of love selfishly, are not felt selfishly at all, by the other lover. If you feel like your lover is actually selfish, it is because of the sole fact that their selfish acts are not out of love and have no relation to you. You’ll become deprived and without. You’ll give your lover an excuse, but you’ll know. You also know you’ll keep doing it, until you’ve built an entire house of toothpicks. Sometimes, you may even choose to move in. More evidence of this selfish concept is seen in the process of separation. Seeing him or her happy is no longer something that makes you feel good, so you feel bad. To be redundant, you feel bad, because you feel bad. You aren’t together anymore, and you don’t feel the high of living on love, so you’re unhappy. That’s a personal, internal conflict. To bring this all together, this is why self-love is so important. When your heart is torn, it is officially your job to be your best self as selfishly as you can, or else you will, again, attract someone that doesn’t fit. Break that cycle. You don’t get what you deserve, you get what you attract. That’s simple. There’s conversation about who deserves better or what someone deserves blah, blah, but at the end of the day, it’s not about deserving, you just get what you attract. Be your truest self, love that self, and you’ll find someone who might love it more. It is true though, that people believe they put themselves second to their lover, but that will be short lived if the other lover isn’t doing the same thing. When it works, it feels safe putting yourself second because you know they are putting you first, until they aren’t. 

The thing about love and beliefs is that you don’t get to choose, you’ll love who you’ll love and believe what you’ll believe. Saying you can believe whatever you want is a damn lie. Your mind may be free, even a highly managed mind, but you’re only open to the evidence you seek, and you’ll only accept what that allotment allows you to. You can only continue to choose what you believe or love after it’s in place, that’s called confirmation bias. And with love, you embrace it, willingly, even its negatives, and that’s okay. A confirmation bias in love is what people call the “hard work” in a relationship. Although this note does not touch much on the logistics of a relationship, but rather the essence and depth, accepting a bias for your lover is nothing to be ashamed of. That willingness should be celebrated, rewarded. 

The last thing you want to be is forgiven, because that means care of amends has been released. But it goes both ways, it’s a fear you don’t get to monitor, and when it’s too late, it’s too late.  Nights sleeping alongside pride become endless. 

You know the flaws, and you’ll turn them against them. Despite having told them how much you adore and love their flaws, and you were not lying. You’ll invite rationale, which is a stranger and enemy to love, yet still a part of life. It will dismantle it, and that’s what you need, if you’re lucky, what you want. You keep asking yourself what they stopped treasuring in you, but all you’re doing is reminding yourself of your self-worth, believe that. It’s not your fault they didn’t see it, it’s not your fault they didn’t think you were worth it. It’s no longer a reflection of you. There’s no dating website for tear capacity or emotional depth. These are intangible aspects of humans, yet necessities. 

Heartbreak is the distance you have to fall between how high you valued your love and how low you valued yourself. That’s why it feels so alone, that’s why it feels so long, and that’s why you feel so pathetic. The fall was inevitable though, because if you aren’t rising along with the love, then the love will end. You’ll ignore it for love, in love, but it is real. Your partner’s responsibility is to value you as much (at least) as you value them, and also as much as you value the union. When this doesn’t happen, someone gets left behind, that is the one who will feel the wrath of a broken heart. You’ll look back on more moments and memories than you even knew you had stored. It will make you wonder, what was love’s clinch, the happiness they brought, or the potential sadness that was being fed by devotion and an increasing vulnerability? Again, happiness or potential sadness. 

My last lover was special, I really felt that way. I will also be forever thankful for what came from it. I learned plenty. I learned how to truly hold delicately the heart of another soul. There was this almost supernatural connection that I will not elaborate on, but I know I will never understand it, but that’s something we both knew. The relationship was mostly very beautiful and that’s what I choose to remember from it, from a retrospective perspective. In her bathroom by her room there was a scale. Every time I stayed at her place, I would obviously end up in the bathroom, and I’d stand on the scale. Sometimes she’d be in there with me and would always tell me, every time, very nonchalantly, “Oh that scale doesn’t work”. The thing is, every time I stood on that scale, I actually weighed a little bit less. Regardless of the physiological reasons like skipping the gym and being extremely busy all summer (my excuse at the time), there’s an abundance of irony in not only the way that I was losing parts of myself, but her unwillingness to believe that the scale did work. 

Your back will try to turn on romance. You can’t stand that you felt the way you did, yet now feel the way you do. And maybe that back will face love head on, but a back faced forward is no face at all, and all the while you know you’re being fake as hell. You can live on love, and now you know you can live better on love, and the fact of the matter, (un)fortunately is that this is independent of a specified lover. It’s not to say it’s impossible, but a back facing love is no way to fall in love again, and that is truly what you yearn for. You know that. You miss what you were and how you saw your natural effects affected your past lover. You should take what optimism you can in this era of pessimistic mental redundancy. From this love you’ll now raise the bar, you know what you’re capable of, and you will never love less. You can still be devoted to love after the end of a relationship, there’s no real reason to act a fool and degrade your self and body in the time that follows, stay true. You’ll remain in search of a depth you do not understand. A depth that  promises a life of digging, finding more reasons for love along the way. It’s the same description of a black hole, we don’t understand it, but we truly feel that we need to because of its inexplicable and palpable power. Every heart is buried at different depths. It’s the holder’s job to know it exists and the lover’s job to stop at nothing to touch it. Someone will find you, and if they’re the right one, they’ll find your heart, regardless of how deep you buried it. Your job is to wait. And you’ll wait, and you’ll wait. I’ll wait. 

Ry