I'm having my definition of love challenged each day. There are so many things I don't know how to be - or do, for that matter - that I find I force myself often into a headfirst rush, else I'll have no choice but to be shocked into stillness.
It was one thing, at first. And it started small. Manageable. A false start, gave me the impression I could handle change, but then, I suppose that's what's needed. We need to be lied to, and to some measure, lie to ourselves, else we'd never get out the door.
A reassurance that you can handle this next step is necessary to start. Even if, at times, it will feel like a lie.
Love. Cleaning the house while talking about grief, and sharing fear. Love.
“Loss becomes the primary condition of living, That doesn’t mean you’re in a hopeless, grief-stricken state all the time; it just means that you carry a deeper understanding of what it is to be human.”
I came across this article from the New Yorker quite by accident (or perhaps syncronicity), while I was contemplating this post.
A few months back, I found great comfort in Nick Cave's meditations on grief. Another one of those situations you don't prepare for, that, if asked, you'd shake your head and say no, I can't do this. Please don't ask me.
The Universe, you'll find, though, seldom takes requests, and more fool you if it heeds yours, because you've likely traded something far more weighty in turn. You must learn to face the chaos voluntarily, or you'll be dragged screaming into it. There is no Option C.
And yet, we keep trying for it. Keep thinking if I'm stubborn enough, if I squirrel my way into the side of the Universe, I might just carve a nook. A place for me and my heart to be safe. Tender-heart. And things you never thought you'd know how to handle. I turn back into my past, and find I've left wisdom carved in the wall for when I grow scaredy cat, and all-shivers.
We grow stilted and awkward, at all the wrong angles, when we cease to love.
I am trying not to, though it's there, beckoning. Still. The unlocked door. The invitation to kick my heels and buck. Buck moon. All I can hope for. Shed my fur, but still carry with me fat chunks of self going forward.
I can redefine love as I go, or I can become my own basilisk.
These are my options.
It frightens me. The fact that, at 26, I still haven't learned how to eat my own words like dirt. That, slave as I am to my own swaying heart, I can silence it long enough to hold you from crumbling. I didn't know I knew how, and it chips away at my sense of who I'm meant to be.
Not in a bad way. I always hoped, as a little girl blue, I'd grow up to be strong. I just never anticipated how much it would ask of me.
One thing it does is give me a better understanding of the people who don't. You can refuse to let the world alter your birthright definitions. You can even attempt to alter them yourself, but, as we say in my country, I don't see you well. You won't end up too good if you place yourself in the world's path, boulder-stubborn and making noise like all get-out about not wanting to change.
Not changing is not an option.
You either change with, or are changed by. They are both tremendously hard, and dare I say, quite unpleasant. But my advice to you would be to choose life. Choose being human, with all the terrible, earth-shaking plethora of emotions it wrings around your neck.
I hear a voice often. Fight. Or run. It's not the correct translation, but the correct English wouldn't be correct Romanian, and I hear it in Romanian. I'll always be grateful to the people who managed to instill in me a sense of integrity.
There are times, increasingly, over this past year, where people I love face me with a choice, where they ask me to be someone I don't believe myself to be. I think, even as they're asking, that I am not strong enough. But then, they ask. And the choice is deferred. The only choice that exists is one of love. Can I step up? Can I be what they need me to be? Can I make this easier for somebody else, even as it is, also, so hard for me?
But isn't that, ultimately, what love asks of you?
