It dawned on me, this isn't going away. I've never loved someone that way. And like the drop on your stomach on a rollercoaster or driving down a steep hill, it hit me: I might always feel this. I don't doubt that I can love again, if that's where my life and path leads. But I have this anchored feeling; grounded in me heavy and settled, like gravity of a thing - that this love will persist in me. It brought me to tears writing that, because the missing is so heavy, too, and I don't want to feel it. The weight of carrying a care that is severed and knowing it will be my companion for a long time, maybe even indefinitely. It's another facet of grief.
I realized recently I'm in another wave of grief. I didn't really feel it for a while, at least not often, and my life went on fairly normally. Perhaps I even distracted myself from it. But you can never do that for long with grief and longing. They make themselves known; demand your attention when you've turned away from or lost sight of them. They remind you that they are far from through here.
Though I've never done *this* before, I do remember feeling like I'd never not feel it. I've loved someone in a romantic relationship before, but this was different, deeper. This was past the infatuation, to the part where you've examined it and you choose it. I knew this was what I wanted, because it was like the way that coming home feels or the way you know your own name. It's a strange and confusing feeling to reconcile now with the fact that he's not in my life. To find yourself in a mix of certainty and want for something that no longer exists. Yet the knowing presses on as if bent on torturing me, while my grief attempts to chip away at it. As it turns out, when you know and you choose like that, it's an arduous process to break down.
While I know I end up sounding mellow dramatic, I try to explain that this wasn't like any old breakup. This is removing from me the fragments of it all. This is coming apart from a whole lived and envisioned life that was based on a togetherness that isn't anymore. For some reason others can be quick to dismiss its significance, but I'm still here, one half of the togetherness, living with still open wounds it left on me.
There is a gaping hole in my life that I'm forced to become familiar with. In spite of my loneliness, as I succumb to it, I'm finding right now I need to be single. I'm finding my heart needs indefinite time to sort through how such certainty became such uncertainty, calling my intuition into question. I don't know if I know how to choose someone. I don't know if I know how to receive love or what it even actually is. I don't know if I know how to love someone else. I don't know how my heart will heal from this ... but I know it's far from through.
