I wrote this for someone I use to be with, whom I still love and care immensely for. I’m slowly learning that love does not equal a relationship status and is not inseparable from possession.
Try as we might to justify love as an “if, then, else” equation or formula, we know deep down it doesn’t work that way. We don’t care only because we want to be cared for in return or else, and we don’t love someone only when we can own them or turn them into someone we want them to be.
Sometimes it’s hard to articulate this without being put on the defensive by labels being thrown around such as “commitment-phobic”, “asshole”, “ungrateful”, “selfish” etc, so I’m putting it down in words here instead.
I love you.
Always remember that. It won’t change, and if it does it will only be loving you more.
Love transcends what we do together or don’t, and it doesn’t need a structure to fit into in order to exist. It just does. It’s beyond pain, joy, happiness and loss. It’s beyond the fights and the celebrations — it exists because it came into being, and once it exists, it cannot go back into non-existence.
That is the way when it is true.
It’s only what we wrap around it that changes, what we put around it in our feeble attempt to define it, to control it or to own it. There is no neediness — there is no need for what you already have, and there is no ownership — it can only be experienced and given, and the more we give, the more we can give and will be given. It is boundless and limitless as our imagination, and the only limit we have is the time we are given in this life to be in it and to be it. There is no try, there is no struggle. It just is.
There is no need to fight for love — something that cannot be undone doesn’t need to fight for it to continue existing. We only fight to choose what we want to wrap it in, and that’s not fighting for love — it’s fighting to confine it by those who haven’t yet truly experienced it.
We cannot create it, we cannot kill it and it is the most magical and wonderful gift that comes when time and space somehow finds a moment between two people that gives it life.
I’m grateful that it came into existence between us, because I know it’s one thing that never goes away and never dies even when life as we know it ends.
Thank you for loving me, and thank you for letting me love you, always.
14 February 2021
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