Real Love

When I was ten years old, I almost drowned in a swimming pool; somehow getting myself stuck between the stainless steel ladder and the wall.  Just a child’s playful carelessness trapped a body’s length below the water’s surface.

Your lungs burn for air but your mind refuses to gasp – knowing, even at that tender age, it will be the last breath you ever take.  You claw wildly at the rough concrete wall as blood seeps out of your fingertips, floating before your eyes like the desperate, winding smoke of a candle being extinguished. 

And I know now, after all these years, that there is Love like this too.  Not that absurd fawning love of naïve newlyweds happily married or couples smug in their own oblivious sexual afterglow, but a sad love – a real love.  Love that, when it ends, will violently grasp and crush the chest.  It too feels like drowning. 

When you really love someone, as so many people claim to, you should realize that there will be a day that one of you departs this life.  One of you will die and the other is going to be very sad.  So make your good moments now.  Do whatever it takes to make the other person smile.  Make every caress count.  Create your best memories so that the person, left behind, will have some way to breathe - some way to fight their way back to the surface.

Because real love also makes you cry.

- Just a peasant

Photo of the outer wall of Nan Madol