swoosh and swirl

For all philosophical and ethical reasons it’s not right to say this, oh, but wouldn’t it be romantic if it were true? Imagine if people were born into this world with a finite amount of love, and when that love runs out, they die. Surely, if someone else said this, I would tear into them, tell them they’re arrogant, that a five-year-old child, for example, who died in a car accident is not a case of “love running out.” But could you blame me for saying it, now that for the second time in my life something inside me has died?

When I was a kid I would look up at the sky, see the brightest star, and imagine it was Neverland from the universe of Peter Pan. I had all kinds of fantasies about how he would sweep me away from this unkind, unjust world, and how we would fly across oceans and forests and mountains, and in the end, I would never grow up. Except, when you dream of never growing up, when you dream of being taken out of this world, you are already grown up anyway. At least, you are not the age you are supposed to be. I think now, if people were born with a certain amount of love, then most of it dies in their childhood.

What is so disappointing about me, that I thought of this world as unfair and unjust at the ripe age of eight? I wish I had a definitive answer.

This second time I died inside was not very long ago. And although, relative to the amount of time we are on this earth, it happened in an instant, the shift makes me not recognize things anymore. For the first time ever, I have noticed wrinkles under my eyes, tiny lines forming in the thin, darkened skin beneath them. Of course it’s not me getting old; I think I just need a good night’s sleep. But a good night’s sleep would never bring back an older version of me who could fall in love. Oh, you only fall in love when you are young. I am young enough too; only twenty-one, but I don’t think I could ever fall in love again. I shall laugh at this sentiment when I am older, I know. But I will let my current-day self grieve the lyrical whirl of this endless life.

My grandfather was one of my favorite people in this world; he died when I was in my early teenage years. I remember how he struggled through the last years of his life, but he never gave up… I find it hauntingly beautiful; those days and months he spent in pain, refusing to give up, even right after his beloved wife’s death. It’s how humans are: we grieve too late. When my grandma died, he kept himself busy all day long; working in the garden, cutting wood… Distracting himself with stacks of books at night, eating clean. But what happens when the days get shorter and all that “not giving up” brings no justice? He gives up. And there he was, in bed, dying. My grandpa wanted to survive until spring, he wanted to survive until spring, but I guess he had no more love left. It emptied out when his partner in life passed away. And I look back with a tremble in my spine, in my body, in general. I don’t think it’s because of the harsh winter, or the fact I’m sitting next to a window that doesn’t insulate heat. I think it’s the realization of how we process grief: we never truly give up when something bad happens. Of course, it’s life 101; if we gave up after each failure, after each bad incident, after each passing of a beloved, we wouldn’t survive a second. But then again, we give up a little later; after each failure, after each bad incident, after each passing of a beloved…

I think I gave up a little when I realized that all my fantasies of flying away to Neverland would never come true, and that the dream I had one night, about being a light fairy who controls light rays, was nothing but a dream. And that feeling, that feeling of waking up after such a dream, when all the love you held inside starts pouring away bit by bit, so that you can feel how you’re emptying out… Well, my grandpa showed me it follows you until the end.

The second time, only the most recent time it happened to me, I did not give up. Love is real; love is something we carry inside; love is something that returns in any way and form. Except the love I am looking for, the kind that comes from a stranger who is no longer a stranger, but the closest person to your heart after your own self, or maybe the closest person in general, I am starting to believe that it is another one of my Peter Pan fantasies.

You only get that kind of love once in your life; only when you are young. This was supposed to be the opening of my book about the horrors of being in a relationship with someone who stabbed your “love stock” and let it spill out. Now I realize: I just grieved what happened a bit too late. Because the stock was already emptied out, I only understood it a year too late. So what is the glamorous story of unrequited love? I am too lazy to write down any more of my tragic stories; I will let the poets handle that. I just remember it as: “you are not my person.” Is anyone? Ever? There must be a million poems about that. So basic of me to write down how upset I was for being rejected. But it’s at the core of all our little deaths in this life. Or ninety-five percent of them. You only get a tiny bit, and when you get rejected, you want to keep that tiny bit to yourself. Humans are selfish, after all…

And so to answer my own question: which I may or may not have raised, we die every single day a little bit, from the day we are born. It is nothing but a result of animalistic emotions. And I take a theological perspective, or a Christian one, though I am in no way religious in the traditional sense. A wise woman once told me how the first humans, Adam and Eve, were kicked out of heaven. But before that, they lived in harmony and had none of the so-called “animalistic senses.” They had no business covering themselves, until they sinned and covered themselves with leaves. I can’t answer the question about the origins of shame, or fear. But I do know that humans evolved in a way that makes them violent, that when we sense hostility, we turn hostile ourselves, that we feel shame and guilt over and over again. And I know that each time this happens, we lose a bit of our love. We betray ourselves, but at the same time, we don’t. We lose someone and try to distract ourselves instead of accepting it, so we lose ourselves in the earth beneath us, and in the leaves of trees, and the midnight stars, when we dream of reaching Neverland – a place that never even existed.