Sometimes we wish someone into our lives. Thinking they’ll distract us from ourselves. Dreaming it’ll sweep us away.
Can someone else do that? Can a love outside of us do that?
You’re thinking you’re going to be peacefully swept away like a calm, turquoise tide on an abandoned beach. Maybe even a nude beach, where everyone’s cute instead of creepy. But sometimes it’s more like the abrupt sweeping away of your hardest work on a chalkboard, right when you get close to “solving” the math or preserving the poem. Or the sweeping of a pizza-ridden pile of NYC street trash. Isn’t it sad to see a perfectly good pie of Joe’s Pizza go to waste?
Some of us do want to get swept away from our shores—regardless of the risk. And what is love without some element of risk? (I don’t know. Peace?)
Perhaps all it ever does is bring us nearer to ourselves and the place we started. When they walk away with whatever was promised, given, or taken. When they walk away with their forevers, the always, those soft but shitty-looking sweatshirts, and the pieces of themselves they promised would only fit into your puzzle.
The ocean of illusion carries us out for a wavy ride. Full of ups and downs, moments of floating, and swimming against the unexpected currents. And we either end up back ashore waiting for the next set of waves or we drown in them. Illusion or not, fighting love is like fighting water. You can’t float if you’re swimming too hard or not swimming at all. It’s a balancing act. You also can’t float, if you’re jumping from boat to boat, trying to decide which will take you for the best ride. How can you float if you never learned to swim? We get to learn to roll with the ocean’s push and pull—that mirrors the tides inside ourselves—and vice versa.
And perhaps love’s exit is like a children’s game nobody wins. The tug of war—and when someone lets go, you end up back on your ass with shorts full of mud. Maybe by schoolyard rules, you’ve won when someone abandons the game, but do you feel like a winner when there’s no resistance? When the one who invited you to the rope leaves you in the mud swearing you don’t ever want to play again?
They say energy isn’t created or destroyed, it only changes forms. If that’s the case, the love energy that was… is. It’s not destroyed. But what does it become? It has to go somewhere. And what if that’s the hardest part?
What if the love you gave them is re-gifted like a birthday present you spent hours searching for through shelves and racks—because you thought this particular motorcycle jacket, pair of banana socks, or dumb turtle trinket would only speak to their soul? You gave it to them and they give it immediately to someone else on their special day? The good-bad jokes you told them, or the sappy playlist you made them—they’re using those to make someone else laugh or cry. Or maybe they didn’t give it to someone else, but went somewhere else entirely, leaving you only with memories and a person-sized hole. An emptiness that, over time, perhaps feels less like a hole but more like part of your whole. If we’re still talking schoolyard games, you’re left in the mud tripping over yourself with your half of the rope. Well, you get to learn to be okay with it. Love doesn’t sit still, it’s fluid. It moves.
Now your love energy needs to go somewhere else. But you don’t want to just swipe through dudes holding fish on Tinder or make out with the one at the end of the bar who has emptied his sixth beer (when your emotional cup is also very empty). Instead of sending that love somewhere else, maybe we have to take it all in and make something of it ourselves. To create something, to make meaning of something that right now feels completely and utterly mean. To give a form and a name to a ghost.
The pendulum swings, and swings, and swings—and if you turn away from it, it’ll hit you in the ass. But perhaps, if we welcome it, the love that we gave returns to us. But it’s more like a return-to-sender package without the cute delivery person, thoughtful note, or at-your-door-on-their-knees apology you were hoping for. And that’s okay. It returns with a different shape. In the form of self-healing. In the form of letting yourself ugly-cry while wiping your mascara away with a warm washcloth. In starting to make the bed again each day. Waking your ass up and writing “you’re a fucking goddess” on a blue post-it you stick on your mirror. Baking banana bread while humming sad songs over the hoots and horns of the city block. In the form of getting bangs or dying your hair fuchsia or blood orange and allowing yourself to make those mistakes—once but maybe never twice. It’s only hair, it’ll grow back, right? Getting lost in a book or finding yourself while writing the one you always swore you would. Even if you never show it to anybody but your inner child—or inner critic. Burning sage with your besties over the nooks and crannies of memory while calling him dusty, bozo, Sir Dickwadington, or whatever you need to get through that day. (Even though you secretly still hold space for the idiot. Or at least the fantasy you projected onto them.) In finally sitting down to the piano to sing—to play for yourself—after months of playing the role of the girlfriend. In all the small but mighty forms of self-love.
When a heart breaks, maybe it bursts. It’s a release of something. A spill. Clean up on aisle 4. Before it’s broken, it’s a container. But what if love is meant to be released, and released, and released? And not kept like stale water in a vase? Because it’s all too heavy to keep and all it wants to do is run. Is this what they mean by an overflowing cup? Or the overflow of an orgasm?
Can you ever promise to give someone love? Or is it something we all already have? What’s the point of promising someone something they cannot take—because they don’t realize it’s already theirs? And it’s always in motion.
Is it inherent? Is it immersive? Is it in or around me? Is it both?
As within, so without. And so on.
When I lost my favorite hat at the bar, a friend wrapped her beer-holding arm around me and said, "Good cowboy hats aren’t meant to be kept, but released into the universe.” Maybe this is the same.
And so on.
11.18.2024
© 2024 Elise Burchard