To those who won’t love

I want to kick you. Hard.  I want you to succumb to the physical pain.  And I want you to use it as a proxy for emotional pain. So imagine that pain, feel it tearing through your body and now make it a million times worse than that.  I want your whole body to be revolting against you. Then imagine the pain as though someone has stabbed you in the chest, not just with a knife but with a pair of scissors, and the weight of a grand piano is sitting on top of those scissors and your chest, and is pushing the scissors open and deeper into you and creating an intolerable pressure and pain that is debilitating. Sometimes all you can do is cry, and sometimes you can’t even cry, you can only sit there and wish that your body would disperse into nothingness. You wish that your body would just fall apart because without your body, the pain you’re feeling wouldn’t exist. So you wish for this, and hope that somehow you will just stop being. Imagine this, because this is what it feels like when someone you love rejects you.

This feeling is a combination of a whole shit ton of other feelings: it’s the realization that you won’t ever get to hold onto that person again, that you won’t ever be able to wake up next to them and feel at ease, and calm, and happy.  It’s knowing that you’ll never be able to share the things you once shared with one another. It’s reminiscing about the memories you created together, and it’s knowing that you will miss them. And then it’s a feeling of shame at the idea of having put yourself so deep into another person’s life and yet you meant nothing to them.  It’s a feeling of shame at the stupidity you exhibited at believing your relationship to mean something more than it was.  It’s the sense of humility at having to tell your friends and family that once again you somehow failed. No, it’s not just that you’ll miss the person; it’s that your individual ego suffers when rejected, or faced with a sense of failure. So it’s this combination, this mixture of overwhelming feelings that causes all of this pain, which at times seems unbearable.

Then, a friend reaches out to you, because they too know this pain.  It might not manifest itself as a pair of scissors and grand piano on the chest for them, but it’s a pain that is a common language to many.  They help make it better, for a while at least. And the weight of the piano no longer feels quite as heavy. Slowly this weight becomes lifted, but then one day it’s all back again, and you’re crying, and sitting, and wishing for nothingness.  Then it eases a bit more and other things in life start to look a little more beautiful and then it’s back.

You might fall into this pattern for a while, but each time you come out of it feeling a little better than before, until the day where you can actually look at someone else and think that there is potential there.  And you’re fine, in fact, you’re better than fine. You are you, and you’re happy because life is about living.  And yeah, it sucks sometimes, but other times it’s amazing, and crazy, and wonderful, and beautiful, and the ecstasy of being happy with the one you are with is just mind boggling giddiness.  It’s always best to feel, to experience, and to live the ups and the downs, because the alternative is to never love and to feel nothing at all.