I was 15 when I felt it for the first time. My best friend told me that my girlfriend didn’t want to be my girlfriend at a high school football game. It was a grown up, physical sort of pain that I had no business feeling. Nothing in my life was worthy of that weight. Nothing mattered, in retrospect. Yet it was there. This human thing of heartbreak. And I carried on the lesson that only love would or ever could do that. The two weeks of listening to the Cure in my bedroom was my first memory of sadness; Privileged to find it in something so superfluous yet so binding to the rest of the world.
We’ve been writing and singing and painting and whittling of love and heartbreak since we’ve been writing and singing and painting and whittling of anything. The high purpose of art is to let each other know that what’s inside you is also inside me; love at our best. The rest of it somewhere behind.
Different now than it once was for me, love is about the familiarity of a life that was once two that is now one. Intertwined in a shared experience of joy and pain and children. I store the detailed parts of myself in her as she does hers in me. We are incomplete without each other. Unclear where one begins and the other ends. Unable to recognize ourselves without the part that is the other. This is love at its zenith; curated through loyalty and sacrifice and a belief that we belong to each other. No longer untethered to hurt only ourselves. And wiser for it.
It takes time. It takes what it takes.
In the end, if we fight the good fight of life we’ll be as Hayden Carruth wrote.
“Now I am almost entirely love”
The whole mess of the world created by the experience of our life swaddled in one feeling. No bitterness. No pain. All that is human along with us is behind again.
There is talk coming about what it means to be human. And what it means to imitate. Where the line of consciousness and agency is drawn between humans and the math of machines. The line is clear and bright. And it lies somewhere beyond the capacity to love, as a human does. As a human ever will.
"Different now than it once was for me, love is about the familiarity of a life that was once two that is now one." I lost my wife to breast cancer 3+ years ago and I interpreted this line from that perspective. As a result I felt "...that was once two is now one." as a loss instead of a bonding. Then the blinding flash of the obvious hit me as to what you were saying in the context of this essay. It is interesting this paragraph is as appropriate to the love felt in grief as it is to love in happiness.