#7: Nothing good gets away
On the premise and for the promise of great love ft. Family of the Year and Fleetwood Mac
In the spirit of International Women’s Day, I’ve been spending the days of March, trying to surround myself with empowering, brilliant female friends. Following one particular dinner rendezvous, I was so distracted by the consuming energy of it all that I took the wrong bus home. When I eventually found the right bus, I was seated 2 seats away from a young woman who was sobbing her heart out.
There are few things better than a cathartic cry (CC). We’ve all had one - at the movie theatre alone, in your shower, in bed on a lonely night in, or after a particularly angsty movie/tv show (“One Day” lovers, I’ve got you). If you haven’t had one yet, I encourage you to find it in your dignity to go for it - seize the day and #freethetears.
In any case, here I was sitting on this bus, tucking into an eclectic playlist of Fleetwood Mac and Family of the Year. And here was this woman, crying her soul out. What surprised me wasn’t the fact that she was crying but more so that at 11:27 PM, in this bus of four people (apart from the driver), no one felt the need to check in and see that she was okay. Call me nosy but as a CC loyalist, I felt a strange kinship to her. So I reached out and asked the obvious - “are you okay?” And her reply was a humbling and rhetorical question, “why is it that we love the ones who hurt us the most?”
During our then near 30 minute conversation, we ended up speaking in great depth of the battles in love she had faced. She was a 32-year old divorcee who had recently found romantic prospects again. But alas, both presented their own set of painful challenges. And so fast forward many difficult details later, here she was crying alone, wishing the tears would unload the heaviness of a trying season of life. At the end of the conversation, no names or numbers were exchanged while we commiserated under the clandestine promise of immediate sisterhood. I shared a letter by Steinbeck with her and encouraged her to read it the morning after.
This letter was once shared with me by the first person I first irrevocably fell in like with. I say like, not love, because I find my 20s have been a dissection of love - its textured grooves, dimly lit caves, dark edges, and the “brighter than a sunny snowy day” patches. It has since become a tradition in my 20s to return to this letter’s wisdom during the high highs and the low lows that love inevitably has presented.
I am guilty, as are most of us, of feeling the fear of having to “start over from scratch” when one love experiences the threat of an “end”. But the reality is love does not ever truly end because its simultaneously amorphous and robust state of being is one that has no start or end.
While we fear about starting over from scratch, that fear is unfounded on the pure premise that we know great love is out there (because we’ve experienced it) and that is only further fodder for the great promise of love. Experiencing great love is not about wins or losses - it’s literally a confirmation that we can offer and receive feelings that, while lacking in logical structure, also colour from an infinite palette.
And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.
And to answer this young woman’s question, while not invalidating the clear pain she was undergoing, I do think we don’t love people the hardest because they hurt us. Rather, the ones who hurt us are inevitably also the ones we choose to love through their lightness and darkness. And loving people through all sorts of weather and in all of their states of being, that is just the power of our ability to feel.
It was Steinbeck who also once said that “all great and precious things are lonely.” On this, I suppose there is a loneliness to great and precious love. To love someone so much that while you know not being with them is ultimately viscerally, physically uncomfortable - that’s a type of love that you also simply need to experience without them to really define it as such.
So yes, an abandoned love experience may seem permanently effaced. However, this same love is also the one that nourishes you with the empirical evidence of the great and precious love to follow. And that person who left you, or appeared to not choose you, they will linger too through your shared memories. You will think about them as you go about your busy days. You may even recount stories of them to perfectly strangers on bus. The point is, they still exist and will continue to exist.
Stories also take their own unconventional pathways. Just because a certain experience concluded does not (in most instances) mean that individual also ceases to exist. They exist in your memories but you also exist in theirs. You think of them on their birthday or similarly significant moments. You wish them well, and you send them pure kindness and love just like you did before - outside the parameters of constructs like a relationship. And that’s the intangible peace of the deepest forms of love.
You’ll make new memories eventually. You will also carry the old ones in the same locket that also adds weight to your feeling. One day, you may open the locket and cry it out on a bus at close to midnight.
Holding space to feel it all is just part and parcel of embracing the unpredictable parts of your psyche. You can let it all go when you want to but you can also choose to believe in the next chapter because you once believed that you would eventually finish the metaphorical book.
Some storms in our minds and hearts are just that loud. But the raindrops have their own hum, a peace in turbulence that we have to appreciate. While we fear losing, the process of love is effortlessly greater than the outcome. Pacing with the process is the point, even when the process may lead us somewhere we never expected.
So as I near my 30th birthday, I am convinced that the premise on which we idolise great love is also precisely its promise. Nothing good gets away.