Love examined in the framework of death and love lost.
Love and death are two ideas, drastically different, but indelibly linked to the human condition.
Recently, my mind has been stuck on the notion of “love” and what exactly quantifies whether its presence in our life is true or not.
I think of the conflicts in the human heart and the failures of the human disposition. How does love exist in that unfathomable space and time between emotion and action? How do we know that the love which exists there is true? When is it that the heart decides it's in love, and how do we ever move on from love that's lost?
It’s within these questions that I found a larger answer to life; love and death are two sides of the same coin. One doesn’t exist without the other, regardless of how humans attempt to frame it.
Think of a relationship that felt meant to be. Two individuals meet each other, and it's as though the stars aligned perfectly to tell their love story before they even attempted to write it. Their arms fit together like two pieces of a puzzle that formed a complete picture. Their minds dance with one another as though they’ve danced together for a lifetime before. And it's in the other's eye that they can observe the world for all its splendor, wonder, and beauty. Those fleeting moments, when both people are together, explain all the confusion the cosmos created. It gives reason to the very idea of life.
Love allows individuals to feel holistically human and completely spiritual in the same breath.
It’s in that love that an individual feels deeper than ever before. It’s in that love, that an individual makes irrational sacrifices for the good of someone else. It’s within that love that an individual begins to feel just how human they are, and for the first time, they enjoy their own mortality.
Until the true love fades. Leaving those two individuals to forever question the validity of their love since its genesis.
Losing true love is death because one never gets over the individual they experienced that love with in the first place. The heart can move on, but it can't forget. So, much like death, time simply moves on, as the heart comes to grips with the reality of a forever, with its forever gone. The pain in the finality of love lost mirrors the pain of death. Love lost, similar to death, means a vanquish of expectations — humanity is forced to accept the finality of the present.
True love can exist and not be forever. The gray area in love is what tortures humanity's soul. And much like the inevitability in death, the inevitability in love lost lies just before the horizon, peaking over the silhouettes of humanity's fears, walls, and lies it tells itself to keep going.
The truth is, love, and the human heart can be conflicted. Both can love the present, but long for the past. They can see the value in the here-and-now and experience yesterday's joys.
Love isn’t definitive. It doesn't just stop and start whenever it sees fit. Its existence remains on a spectrum, navigating the difficulties of a human mind tortured with fear of the future and nostalgia.
Much like the hope of an afterlife, love keeps going — even in its death. Love keeps feeling, love keeps doing, and love keeps experience long after the mind says it shouldn’t.
Love has a strange immensity to its existence. And it's in that immensity that it brings humanity back from the brink of self-destruction. It’s love that drives humanity’s hope of an afterlife in death. It's in the afterlife that humanity finds another chance at love lost.
Love and death are two sides of the same coin. Love lost, and love gained are all each an element of the human experience; much like a life lived, and a life lost pontificates authentic humanity. Both ideas are the very fabric of human consciousness.
In the end, the only souls I feel pity for are those that allowed their heart to love once and never again or the individuals that forced their heart to forget what unadulterated love really felt like.
“To all those lost souls who have forgotten to believe in the immensity of love.”
