Can you still feel love? Is it your imagination, or attachment to a feeling? Whatever your experience, you are in the driver’s seat. Experience is your passenger. Take it where you will.
Choosing to love is choosing exposure to pain. Pain of separation may come in the form of death, but often it arrives by a choosing to leave by one party or the other. To some relationships, the pain of being together is greater than the pain of being apart in which case a “good riddance” stance may develop. For others, there’s a kind of love that does not leave the soul. It resides there, in the mind, will, and emotion, ready to come surging up at the hearing of a song, a poem, or some story told by another. That love may be stirred by a smell, a taste, a situation, a place, or otherwise inanimate objects. Such memory triggers are often dealt with and worked through by desensitization ’till days may again be embraced without constant reminders of loss. Conscious memories and their triggers may be massaged to neutral, yet nevertheless and perhaps most often, that love surges up in the still of night, when the mind most relaxes. Awake from that dream, with for a moment difficulty sorting reality. The object of your affections may be separated from you by death, but not always. Lost relationships hurt with equal force, broken bonds cut into the soul with similar pains.
Push down and otherwise distract to get through the moments, but at the end of those moments and even during them, a grieving process is reigning. Life is full of loss: relationship, role, income, physical ability. Learn to grieve well that you may live well.
*Side note: some of us develop emotional attachment to vehicles. Bond with them during enjoyable times shared with loved ones, or by spending hours working on them to create a desired outcome. Part with said vehicle, and spot it cruising around town only to have a sense of ownership or longing for what was shared in that vessel. Perhaps this is just an American thing. Most folks who have owned a special vehicle may relate? They can be as a family member, yes?
Speakeasy Photos
MUAH: Danyelle “The Hair Maverick” Johnson
Model: Matt Martin