January 23, 2014

The dive.


When you love someone, a lover or a friend, that person attains the immediate value of ALL the things and ALL the persons in the world. Their opinion of you becomes an absolute truth, a sentence you uncomplainingly accept for yourself. You become the good and the bad they see in you, the virtue and the evil, the splendor and the insignificance! It is a power you give away. A power that can make you invincible, indestructibly talented, beautiful and capable… but it can also make you absolutely defeated!

She discovered all this the hardest possible way...

When the love that once embraced her was gone and regret took its place, bitterness dominated, making her soul too heavy for the body to carry, too somber, too crushed. Only then she recognized the force of that control she hadn’t noticed was not hers anymore. It was now a losing game when carrying on seemed impossible without that strength.

All of us search for the same understanding, the same comprehension. All of us string ourselves up for love and acceptance, for a bigger than life plan that will reveal the truth and make us recognize, not only all that we have ahead, but also all that we were and went through… a plan that can assure us we were not wasting our young years. This road is but a narrow clifwalk that needs all the balance one can gather.

When she lost the stability she had neatly built, even if just for a moment, when the shoulder she was leaning on was so suddenly gone and that lover she trusted disappeared down a palm tree road, it became momentarily hard to see any kind of bright vision ahead. Abruptly a gloomy feeling embraced all her body grasping deep for what was left of her heart… the darkness was so dense it extinguished all of the light and she briefly stop being. 

The way back to the surface from the deep hole of suffocating loss is a slow ascent, a controlled process of decompression, stage by stage, letting the air and light in gradually and teaching the lungs how to go from shallow to deep normal breaths full of oxygen…full of life. It is a path that must be taken gently to avoid shock… a difficult route to reach again the sunlight and the rainbow colors there is to enjoy... 

She had to learn to grow back to herself. Grow back her bones, her loins, her skin… stand again and walk again, with her own two crooked feet. For too long life lingered like a hazy dark fantasy, until she realized she had to trail alone through the tortuous, unconfident road, if there was any hope of retrieving that lost power… 

…And if she ever gets it back to herself, she will think twice before letting it fly away with anyone, for they one day might be, merely, someone she used to know.



"You wanna climb up the stairs,
I wanna push you back down.
But I let you inside,

So you can push me around.

If I leave before you,
And I walk out alone,
Keep your hands to yourself
When you follow me home.


I don’t want love."

Michael Jay Lerner, Peter Joseph Silberman and Darby Austin Cicci.