art by ré mí fhloinn
I have, after all these years, come to believe that everything I feel throughout the span of a year intensifies around the time when the monsoon clouds stop by to rain over my city. The leaden clouds with their heavy faces and cascade of icy droplets seep into my skin and electrify my spirit beyond the capacity of verbal description. That being said, it never seemed to work in a way where I found myself being washed off of the crusty, parched layers of words that were never spoken or tears that were cried in silence. This time around though, the rainstorms worked like a balm to my wounds – wounds that dried up a long time ago, wounds that were healing and wounds as fresh as a rainy morning.
The pain that gathered under my skin and in my veins like warm, scarlet blood during the course of the summer was something I longed to get rid of; for it was the pain that was rooted in the forceful murder of the renewed sense of life a romantic love had sprouted in me; almost like trying to get rid of a child that one had birthed and nurtured. I think the most difficult part of moving on is neither attempting to forget or forgive the person who hurt you, it is having to tell yourself to stop feeling a certain way because everything transformed on the outside. Everywhere I look, I find poetry and prose stemmed from broken hearts about the pain that a failed love brings and yet, no one seems to have figured out how one can go about living without having to die a little every single day since.
For the first time in what seemed like forever, it had felt like I found the shade of security and sensitivity from the scorching indifference of the world when he waltzed into my life with his humor of a twelve-year-old boy and wisdom of an ancient sage. I spent some of my emotionally charged good and bad days having him around to soothe the scars that years and years of pretending to be tough gave me. It felt liberating to have had someone to hand-hold me through some dark days and some beautifully rosy ones; only to discover that one day you’re going to have to begin from square one. Death hurts even more when you are in the eye of the storm and the death of feeling a specific way is probably the most brutal of its kind.
As profoundly tragic it seemed to me when I was in the eye of the storm, I lost a part of me to him and everything we created for ourselves, forever. It was not just the demise of a sense of reality but also one where the power of our truths failed. Entire universes that we built collapsed into rubble, our silly ideas asphyxiated by the mortal mistakes we made as flawed humans. As much as it broke me, it amazed me to have intensely experienced the capacity something so beautiful had to be destructive.
Yet, I can’t help wonder what happens to the love that we let go – does it all collect in a secret box in possession of the universe, or does it fly like an orphaned feather in the wind?