On Love and Other Fictions

O Love—

Or should I call you “O Love”, given how the word once had warmth but now only resounds with memory? 

Even with this pen trembling above the silence you left me with, I cannot bring myself to call you anything else. No matter how far you have drifted, no matter how effortlessly you have severed something that once felt so sacred, the reality is that through you, I first truly believed that there was meaning in something—anything—in this indifferent world.

And to think how ironic that is? That which once made meaning to everything is now the thing that separates meaning apart? 

I am not writing to blame you. I am writing to understand.

To understand how something that once felt full could be so empty.

To understand why love—of all the human delusions—feels like we are Gods, only to leave us feeling more broken than the earth we made from clay. 

And mostly to understand myself. Because for the first time in loving you, I had at last recognized myself. Now, in losing you, I wonder if I even exist.

Your disappearance was not abrupt. It was a gradual unfurling, much like light surrendering to dark.

You became indifferent to listening before you became indifferent to speaking.

You stopped seeing me long before you left.

You did not betray me with a catastrophic departure, but a solemn indifference to your arrival... and a purposeful distancing no longer requiring me to bridge the gap.

I can remember loving you. However, I cannot remember who I was before you wore away everything, attempting to hold on to what held on to me.

Love, I once thought, is resistance against the absurdity of existence; a scream into nothingness, that returns. And now I know what I will eventually learn, too— all echoes die.

When echoes die, all that I am left with is my voice and heart, trying to explain itself to itself in the empty hall of memory.

You didn't see that the world could not fall into pieces when you left.

The birds still sang. The sun still rose. The universe - implacably vast, indifferent to my anguish.

And perhaps the most extraordinary betrayal of all, not yours, but the empty indifference of the cosmos to grief.

What is this pain, if it isn't proof of the human condition?

We love, not because life is meaningful, but because we hope it might be one day.

We love because we dread the cold machine that is existence.

We dream because we cannot endure the mathematics of being awake.

We reach out because anything less makes us organisms pretending not to decay.

Still, I loved you.

Not for what you gave me, but for what I gave you: myself, completely.

In a world that panders to nothing that can't be purchased, I gave you the last thing I owned: my belief.

And now I am left with nothing but a veracity that feels only disposable: I do not know who I am without the person I was when I loved you.

Is love really love if it isn't returned?

Or is it madness, though a beautifully clad sort of madness?

I’ve asked myself too many nights whether you genuinely loved me or only allowed yourself to love being loved,

And I see now, it doesn’t matter.

In the end, real love has to be singular. A leap we take by ourselves.

Even two hearts can touch, though they never really connect. They are only together for a while--a very short while, a spark of light, and then they slip back into their separateness.

You see, betrayal is not just a rupture of the heart. It is a rupture of being.

It makes you question being itself.

Did I imagine you? Did I fabricate all of it?

Had I only been talking to a reflection that took on the shape of a significant other?

If so, then what is?

And if being itself can betray us--what remains of a sanctuary for the soul?

They tell us that the heart is resilient. That it heals.

What they don't tell you is that it never comes back to the same shape it was.

It remains warped, strange, doesn't make the same noises-- is more doubtful of the joys, more distrusting of the miracles.

So, what do I do now? 

I don't want you back. That door is nothing but a frame and left memories. 

I don't want closure either, cause closure is a ruse sold to us by the frightened people with the open wounds taking care of it for us. 

Wounds never close. They change. They grow teeth. They are now part of your anatomy. 

They leave you with a limp of the soul.

But I do wish to say this—

In loving you, I witnessed the divine.

And in losing you, I saw the absurd.

And now I bear both like twin scars across the ribcage of my being.

There is no lesson here. No didactic.

Only the quiet acceptance that love does not save us.

It reveals us.

And sometimes, it leaves us standing alone with the version of ourselves we are not ready to see.

But perhaps that is a kind of grace.

To be stripped of illusion.

To grieve not only the person who left, but the person we were with them.

To finally meet the self we are— alone, untethered, and awake.

So let this letter be neither a pleading nor an accusation—

But an elegy.

An elegy to all the versions of me that loved you.

To all the meanings we tried to forge in the fire.

To all the silences we mistook for peace.

I bury them here in words, for there is nowhere else to place them.

And I continue—not healed, but human.

Not whole, but honest.

Not loved, but still able to love.

Even in the face of betrayal.

Even in the face of meaninglessness.

Even in the face of you.

Yours—

In what could’ve been,

In what never was,

In what will never be again,

—A Devotee of the Dismantled Divine