Authors note: I’ve been writing mostly sad things lately and I want to remind myself of how I felt in those early days and that I can find that again. Here is a short essay I wrote in the first few months where there was just love.
Solitary. That is how I would describe myself. Solitary, alone, unaccompanied. I have always been in an understanding with whatever higher power exists that I was a soul created to be alone. I was adamant about the fact that I simply wasn’t meant to be loved, I knew this to be true until I didn’t. Like Icarus, my certainty began melting like his wax wings, I fell. Not only did I fall in love with someone else, but I also fell in love with life. I have fallen in love with the way the birds sound in the morning, how a song devotes its existence to me with each chord, and how the wind kisses my cheeks. Finally, after years of feeling a void of nothingness, I have fallen in love with feeling. I have been baptized by love, all of the pain and sadness I harbored within just washed away, revitalizing my tired heart. I was set free, I had trapped myself out of fear and in turn sentenced myself to emotional damnation. I can’t say I know much to be true but I do know the key to truly living is simply to love. To love yourself, to love someone else for all of their quirks and flaws, to love the heartbreak and all other feelings that may accompany, to love your failures and mistakes, and to learn that love comes in many facets not just romantic. I was so clouded by my pessimistic certainty that it took another person to show me what steps it took to live.
Step one: Understanding that feeling all of your emotions, even the painful ones, is part of living. I can’t feel anything small any more. My emotions are never one-sided, never surface level, never small. I feel venom on my tongue when I’m jealous, absolute devotion that burns in my heart, fervent joy that staples a smile so wide on my face it hurts. Deep and ionate feelings are a double-edged sword. My sword can be my salvation or my downfall, a tool with which I finish my hero’s journey or one that delivers my final blow. Oh so dangerous, yet so essential to the development of the characters.
Step two: Knowing that the love I feel for this person that burns so intensely doesn’t equate to my worth. I look back now knowing that I could’ve liberated myself, but I was so familiar with feeling nothing that feeling anything was a death sentence to me. With this step in mind, I work to liberate others through my love. To show my absolute devotion in poems, letters, and words, in the food I make, in my laugh. To entice the ones who neglect to feel, who cage themselves out of fear as I did. To entice them into salvation. Heaven is a place on Earth when you open your eyes and see it to be. Take my hand and let me love you enough to set you free.
I couldn’t respond to these prompts separately because they intertwine like vines that grow over a house. I needed to connect them to show my own personal growth. So, I have taken the necessary steps to live a divine life, by disproving what I thought to be true.
That leaves just one more question. Where will my love take me? To the ends of the earth darling. Just to feel my abdomen hurt from laughing too hard, feel the air dance in my lungs when I breathe in, to kiss your lips one more time and know that I am living and you are too.
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