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
posted by Just a peasant at Tuesday, February 04, 2014
5 Comments:
You know, it gave me a real fright when my husband got hospitalized last year. He's OK now, but we never found out what had made him so ill.
I don't know if I would want to rise to the surface if my loved ones were gone. Living a life is hard enough as it is; if there was nothing to live for, I might just prefer to learn to stay below the surface--developing gills and all. :)
Ayano xxx
Oh no! I'm so glad he is alright. Yes, if we could grow gills I'm sure it would make things much easier.
Love is the only thing that lets us forget the finiteness of life.
Michael
On one level I agree with you. But for myself, I can't help but, when contemplating or savoring something beautiful, also realizing that it must end. Impermanence. Hmmm . . . maybe a post about this would be healthy. But please don't think I'm being dismissive of the emotion you posit here.
Hi Just-a-Peasant, I completely agree, that what I said is a complete illusion. Love does not defeat death (apart from contributing the transmission of our genes to the next generations, but this also happens without love). But
it can make us forget about the inevitable finiteness of human live.
And I would also call it love, if one is really devoted to its creativity, discover nature, write a book, compose music, design a beautiful furniture or build a nice house. And these human artefacts have the potential to survive us and tell the later generations about our ingeniousness.
regards, Michael
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