Love ardently

 A Garden of Endless Tears

Excerpt

I cannot stop these tears from forming. They are this whole world for me. All I am, all I ever could become, lives within these tears. When they dry, I too will dry—shrivel away, and vanish. Without him, there's no tomorrow for me. My whole life gathers in these tears, and when they fall, I am consumed by them.

I have known only one love and one love alone. My entire being resided in this singular passion—and that is him. How could he deny it? Even he cannot deny its truth: Today marks the end of me. He will go on… farewell. But see, I existed only for him. Today, now he’s gone, I finally see clearly. Someday, you’ll see it, too…

And how could one imagine something worse than this? There's nothing worse than this pain. Everything else ceases in its presence—everything beyond this heartbreak doesn’t even exist.

Maybe I’ll carry on somehow, but I don't know. Truly, there is no tomorrow left. When he met me, the past ceased to be, and the future opened, swallowing me whole. Today is when I died. It's such a pretty day today—and yet the moment he left, tomorrow disappeared.

I smelled ashes this morning. It's all I remember now. A fire had burned fiercely, briefly—it flared, then it vanished. So sudden. Now, all I do is choke and cough on ashes.

Perhaps you won't feel a single thing reading these lines, these futile words with which I've struggled to contain endless sorrow. I don't know anymore, can't even begin to guess the wonder or curses in your head. I lost you when you cut yourself loose from me. In the womb we were one, bound tight, until he severed the cord between us. I don’t know. All that remains clear to me now is that I'll forever relive that wild afternoon—that moment my heart beat for someone else, for the very first and last time. It was the sweetest of my days and darkest aussi. Such is every beautiful dream…

You left me? I can't even pretend to understand. Were you afraid? Didn't you know what your absence would mean…?

Pretend, if you will, that you owe me nothing. And that all the world is green. We could bring back those lovely days again—when all the world was green…

Where have you gone? When will you come back to me? I've never known grief such as this before. I do not believe I ever could again. Maybe you couldn't possibly understand it—but oh God, I wish I could show it to you. Where my heart once beat, there now are claws. Ripping, digging deep into flesh and bone, into stone and earth. It hurts. How it hurts. Yet I invite it to consume me entirely—a final act of devotion. Never question it, never doubt it… You pressed the dagger deep. And now, as the poison travels through my veins, it is you I think of.

You are beautiful—so terribly beautiful. There aren't tears anymore. There are endless tears. Now I am gone. I am dead.

—

But what is love anyway, that they make it a rule of the house? To wipe your feet at the door… to never cheat on your woman… this is how they want love to be. But who can truly respect rules like these, turning a beating heart into a servant of mere conjugality? There's something even more superficial—the arithmetic they pretend love follows. Tell me, how can two lovers cleanly split apart? Yes, a bandage left on a wound too long will cling so tightly, you must tear flesh along with linen just to remove it. But two souls intertwined—don't they grow together after a time?

If a love affair is merely a pact made for comfort and security, then surely one ought to feel ashamed protesting its end. But how in heaven's name can one accept that vulgar calculation—that soulful love is like combining abstract amounts? Two liters of water mixed with salt become something different altogether. Separate them, they'll never be precisely the same again. It’s absurd… how can anyone believe in such false clarity?

To treat love this simple way is to think like the shallowest of people, foolishly… believing a man simply lends his soul and retrieves exactly what he gave away, untouched. And why wouldn't he? He thinks it's his rightful due—to reclaim precisely that which he offered.

A great love, though—it's a long process of gentle suggestion, nurtured in quiet complicity. It often begins forced—perhaps pity moves you first, duty or sympathy. You begin loving him from kindness, telling yourself it isn’t right to wound him or betray his trust. Then—slowly, ever so slowly—you love his smile, his voice, as familiar and precious as the landscape around your childhood home. Little by little, his daily presence becomes like air, necessary and unnoticed. Other friendships and joyful affections cease to bloom. Your future reshapes itself entirely to suit him, your moments of success only meaningful when crowned by his approving eye.

Psychologists tell us repeated emotions stabilize—clinging willingly to one emotion eventually leads tragically to its sorrowful fixation. Every great love becomes an obsession, voluntary at first, pathological eventually.

A man builds a house for his woman, buys the furnishings she desires, shapes his habits to please her. His lifetime stretches out before them both—but then he leaves. And she cannot stop worrying that some misfortune has claimed him. The smallest illusion of him cuts deeply like a needle. She falls mad with joy when, despite hardship, he surprises her with unexpected sweetness.

Then, one miserable day—he decides, in cold cruelty, it's over. All arrangements end abruptly, abandoning her heart at the station platform. Even Shakespeare's Shylock lacked courage to slice precisely the pound of flesh owed him—for he knew too well the impossible violence of the act.

Yet a woman imagines she can separate out exactly her portion from the unity love creates—like detaching twins joined at birth, pretending both will remain unharmed. But when one truly loves—when one makes impossible demands—such parting inevitably destroys. The one left behind will seek death. And perhaps, first, claim her right to send death ahead of herself.

But isn't this exactly why love is beautiful? Those who dare love deeply risk the very grave itself, claiming a sacred power over life and death—one heart over another heart.