I
have a certain fear. I don’t think there’s a name for it, though I’m certain I
can’t be the only bearer of it. When I experience a new kind of happiness, for
there are many, I fear that losing the person involved in it, means never
finding this kind of happiness again. Never experiencing it again. I attach the
feeling to the person and I make it unique. A solitary instance of joy. I
believe there will be others; I am an optimist in that regard, but never the
same one again.
Happiness
does not repeat itself. For it is bound to the unique set of circumstances in
which it was found and experienced. It is conceived as a result of an exclusive
weaving of human interaction during which a connection was made.
Exclusive
being the operative word.
F.
Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “there are all kinds of love in this world but
never the same love twice,” and I couldn’t agree more.
Regardless
of whether it was a friend, a lover, a sibling, a parent, an acquaintance, or
even an idea; whether it brought you to your knees after it had elevated you,
whether it illuminated everything around you and inside of you before it made
you gravitate towards a black hole, it was and will always be one of a kind.
There is merit in this, and one can even claim that this is the beauty of it.
But sometimes…oh sometimes the loss feels unbearable.
What
is possibly even more extraordinary is the fact that even with the same person,
this very feeling alters, evolves, mutates, as it adapts to its new environment
while it feeds off its two hosts. As the creators transform, so does the
feeling, its strain dependent on a dynamic, the force with which the two humans
express and embody love.
So
this fear…is what has often kept me rooted in the past. Trying to relive
moments I’ve safely stored inside my head. But memories are fickle; the longer
they reside inside your frontal lobe the more warped they become, until all
they are is daydreams.
Desperately
trying to reclaim the chemical reaction that put your limbic system into
overdrive, you rewind and replay, but in the end your addiction consumes your
present and deifies ordinary aspects of a seemingly extraordinary encounter.
And you become a prisoner of your own life.
I’ve
recently begun to crawl out of this cell. Turns out the bars have always been wide
enough to slide through. Can’t say I’m out of the woods yet, but I can
definitely see the sky…and it is starlit.