What is love? When we are young, we believe flushed skin and passion define it. We don’t fully understand how expansive and burdensome our lives will become and how a singular love will writhe and gasp through time, forgetting its youth and rapture.
It has taken me years to understand that love can be cruel and unfair.
Love jerks and plummets, rises and rushes, and sometimes stops abruptly, as if that may be the end of you. But it is likely not the end, even though you might be deprived of oxygen. Still, you may wish it were.
Over time, love can exhibit anguish, grace, immeasurable sadness and incomprehensible joy. It can be subsumed in darkness as well as light. It lingers on your lips, at times in the form of sweat but more often, tears. It provides moments of rage, thoughts of retribution, lost days and nights that will never be forgotten or recovered. It has it’s own heartbeat and it’s own resonance. It can break you.
So can love turn to hate, you ask, or worse, scorn? What keeps us from turning away, from closing the book forever and taking shaky steps in another direction?
I don’t know. All I know is that when love becomes painful, it is time to breathe deeply and forget everything you’ve been taught about the fairy tale.
It is now time to make your own story. That life-long love may survive but the fairy tale needs to be updated.
HORTUS 2: There is life after retail 
Thoughtful and truth.
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Thanks for reading and commenting Barb xo
Yes, young love is INTOXICATING and fun and full of worries…mature love is quieter, steadier. However, nothing guaranties smooth sailing. Ailsa, thinking of you and hoping things will steady themselves.
Thank you Carmen – that is so nice of you. I am counting on 2020 being a better year. All the best to you in the new year as well!