“You can love someone so much…But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.” ~John Green
There’s something special about falling in love.
It is a unique experience onto itself. Nothing compares to it save for when your children are born, and that’s because it is another way of falling in love.
Which brings us back to the uniqueness of falling in love with someone else. It’s something you’re never truly prepared to experience. You find it when you aren’t even looking for it, or perhaps it finds you. In any case, it always takes you by surprise.
Though falling in love is a process, a slow and beautiful transition from the self to the unification of souls, it is one you may not even realize you’re falling into until you’re actually in it.
To undo it is an arduous process because it entails extracting a part of whom you have become to be less than what you were before it began.
Imagine waking before dawn and watching the sunrise. Now, remove the sun from the sky and try to forget what you witnessed.
There was nothing there, and then you saw the sun, but then the sun has vanished.
What becomes of the day?
I still remember what it felt like to be in her arms and lose myself in her embrace.
At first, I was alone, and then she wrapped her arms around my heart…and then destiny yanked her away.
Now, I can only reflect on the glint in her eyes when we stood a handsbreadth apart.
Loving her is all I’ve known for the better part of my life.
From our first date at the theater one mid-summer night, after which we took a long walk through the town square. We later sat on a bench near the fountain and spoke under her reflection in the sky—the moon.
We discussed our hopes and dreams and first made plans of a lifetime together.
It simply felt right.
Before we parted at the end of the night, we held each other so close that our bodies lingered on the edge of reason. She later confessed she’d had a “moment” in my embrace, and I knew our passions would reach heights we never had, or ever would experience with anyone else.
We didn’t kiss though.
That didn’t happen for a few more weeks, and when it finally did occur she fled into the darkness. It was a slow and passionate kiss in the middle of the night that she confessed shook her to her core and awakened something in her that she’d long thought dead.
A few weeks passed before our bodies touched again and our souls bled into each other. Driven by desire, inspired by love, I guided her along the path of passion to be seared by the fires in her heart.
All these years later, I reflect on how it used to be that we kissed and made love to memorize each other’s souls. Now, we don’t speak, perhaps to avoid memorizing the pain in each other’s eyes.
Though they say the depth of love equates to the pain in the aftermath of heartbreak, I confess that I do not regret having fallen in love with her. I do not believe myself capable of climbing out from this shadowed abyss where I search for her among the veils of memory. Like wisps of smoke leading me from one moment to the next chasing a dream from which I shall never awaken, pursuing the ghost in my heart.
Felix Alexander Writer 