I am just as much comforted by the memory of you as much as I am haunted. We never really fully understand the necessity for encountering in our past, a love strong enough to fulfill our loneliness, validate our vanities, ease our pain, caress our intimate desires, yet weak enough to completely slip out of grasp ending eternally. Only it doesn't end. No, indeed reality has simply been altered. Once a serene, lively meadow we used to draw nourishment from, lying naked and warm near, the summer pools, abruptly became struck by lightning; a completely natural force also a part of our beautiful world conflagrating everything we hold dear with one another.
For we never prepared ourselves to lose what we called home, so we burned and suffocated trying to grasp what we could of our once pulchritudinous reality. It got to the point where our pain overpowered the sentiment of our glade and at different paces, depending on our separate tolerances of pain, we abandoned our post fleeing to first recover before recollecting which direction to go from there.
Separated from each other our first instinct was to heal before finding new value to be alive. For being alive at all to me seemed to be the only gratification I had left. Trauma left only so much energy for healing. Though I knew growth to be possible, I knew from the devastation it would be marvelously slow. Part of that delay was that winter came. Aching, I lay cold and alone wondering about you and if you were ever alright. Why hadn't you found me yet? I would ask myself with fear and confidence you weren't even looking.
When we fled from being in too much pain, quite contradicting, I realized in order to heal from the pain I would need to find a new paradise, though, I awaited you where it was obvious to be found, the cold barren waste left of what once was a home. After inviting others to try to fill that void back with joy and life, I realized I couldn't stay for there remained too many skeletons of our lost reality.
I walked until my feet bled. I hunted. I forged until surviving was my new nature. Eventually I lit a fire that warmed me full to the bone. I noticed the stars and the moon again. I remembered how beautiful and vast the world is. I felt alive and that I was alive for the purpose of appreciating all of the universe, it's wonders, and creations.
Then suddenly...
There you were.
All of my progress, my strength I had gained weakened when I saw you. You had settled not quite in a place as magical as ours, but still a new home. What halted me and churned my stomach, heart, and mind was that you had settled; without me. You hadn't gone far. You hadn't searched for me. You were contempt with the companionship of another and we both knew it was still far from the equivalent of our oasis. Regardless you perched where you were while I awaited; longed; needed you to find your way back to me again.
What happened next:
Well, we tried to go back to our paradise. We would visit it from time to time for I know you tried because you knew there was always fire, earth, and water all harmoniously blended in me before it perished in the fire. Though I felt it had returned strong as ever you couldn't stop focusing on what was lost rather than right in front of you strong as ever. You saw the skeletons. I saw fertile ground for life to be reborn.
Remorse always won. There was grief because we were haunted by the pleasant image of our place when we were left with the sad reality of what remained. Our actual scars reminded us of the pain we endured clinging to our euphoria as it burned. In grief you would flee back to where you settled and back to your companion afraid to ignite passion because it left you so burned before.
I was stuck in a vicious cycle of exploring my potential, returning to wait for you then being halted in hopes you'd at last return for good to stay, to build a new home with me. Time and time again you never did. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, but expecting a different result. I'm not sure you realize what it feels like to wait for someone that can return, but never will. So that I am no longer preventing my growth, I don't have energy to return to this place much longer. Less and less I will return too because I cannot bare the emptiness of this land.
In time, a blade of grass will sprout; a flower will blossom; a rabbit will scurry. Our meadow will flourish again with life while you settle wherever you are in the world and I wander my destiny in the vast trees through the night. Eventually we'll both enter new nirvanas, but our old thriving one we loved so much, that resurrected and persists forever in who we are, will never be our meadow to dwell in together again.
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