As part of Marco Estrella’s 3 part series on Love:
Memory and Love
On Losing Someone
Saying Goodbye
Art: Black on Maroon by Mark Rothko
Love is consuming, confusing, yet surprisingly simple. Love exists only to guide our happiness, in a realm away from our day-to-day lives, interfering only when it guides us on whom to appreciate and who to respect.
This is the last essay I will write on love.
I had my heart broken twenty days ago, yet I didn’t stop loving. I got hurt and things changed, but I didn’t know how to adapt to my new reality. I kept on loving and wanting to be loved back in the way of the past. I expected to be loved back in this way even when everything changed.
For twenty-five days I stayed next to my once known love. I talked to them, I thought about them continually. Like a song on repeat, I never stopped listening to them.
I knew that I have to stop this song because they told me they did not love me anymore.
Yet my own love never understood that I was not loved back in that way. I did not comprehended that six months of love could end, even though I knew when I got my heart broken that everything ended.
For four day I was heart broken, I knew everything had ended, and my once best friend knew it too. They told me that they had not loved me, that I was unpredictable, that they could never be with me.
I grew to forget what I thought I never would. Five day after they crushed my heart I was just as in I loved with them as I had before. But still they didn’t love me.
For the next fifteen days I loved them and tried to show that we could love each other and would grow upset despite that we could never be together grew.
For all the days till today I have never said no. I have never shut out the idea of a possibility for the love like this one, which I had for 6 months. I never cared about myself or my true happiness for my only belief was that once they loved me all my own problems would fix themselves.
To be happy. It was my own love that I needed.
Love is the power to say No to false love. At its worse love is known as anxiety, but when love is pure and clearest is has the ability to clear our minds setting us up to become the best we can be. I yearn for that love, but I never said No to myself when I pictured it with the one who broke me. I never understood that I had to love myself till I was my best.
So while love can be beautiful, tainted love is a sign to say No to these feelings of lust. No is to respect ourselves with no fear of the force than can drive us to anxiety. No is to evolve with no regard for the people that hurt us, those people that range from friends to lovers.
Love can prevent the inexperienced from becoming the happiest person they can be; all love can degrade us. It can drag us through rock and soil and leave us wanting more, but to be happy we must get up and leave.
The heights of Love shouldn’t be feared. Love is multi-faceted belonging to a family of natural forces. It can be as volatile as a mountain or as deeply twisting as a tornado; love is unkind but too complex to dismiss.
Yet the fact that love ends and has the ability to destroy us is what makes love all the more beauty.
Today I said goodbye to the past 7 months with my best friend, we have ended all ties and parted our bonds. I said No more to them because as much as I want for the 6 months to come back, No is the truth.
No is my word for love.