“If I didn’t love you then, I certainly love you now”
Because the meaning of love changes, when love grows.
In the mensis horribilis that I have just had, with goodbyes to throw at people, terror attacks, insults received, insults generated in my head, pain never processed, love I cannot love and love I cannot live, lies spread and lies strengthened out, a trip East reminds me life can be slower and better and desires are never shameful nor inconvenient.
The pastel colours and the everydayness of Brno, the heated rounded rooftops of churches, galleries and elegant facades, the good coffee and the even better sweets, the usual bar at the shades of the park and the cheap tasty beer, the million consonants and the rough sounds of language, his sweet eyes and my alive mind. And the connections, the conversations, the confessions, the back and forth of stimuli, and the intellectual selves.
“If I didn’t love you then, I certainly love you now”
Because now this feels like somewhere I have been before, it feels like as I can walk without maps in the city, finally, I also do not need guidance with my Man of the Lake, I am me, finally just me, and the paths are known, the sweetness in his eyes is real and is just that, sweetness, while honesty and trust made us overcome the shadows and the walls and the expectations.
“If I didn’t love you then, I certainly love you now”
Notwithstanding the mensis horribilis that this month has been, I am still convinced love gives you super powers, I am convinced, still, that with a second of love - six years ago as six months ago - my external world becomes vaster, clearer, the colours brighter, the sky higher while my internal world expands to receive a tiny bit of infinity. That never leaves. The more infinity shoots deep in me, the longer I will live that moment of love, over and over again.
My Man of the Lake has been infinity since the beginning, but that love never quite developed as it could have or I would have. It grew abstract and couldn’t survive. But love changes with rejection and acceptance, and, if it is true, it adapts to the concreteness it faces, to the yes, the no, the sweetness that is just sweetness and the distance dictated by comfort.
“If I didn’t love you then, I certainly love you now”
Even if I feel on my skin the forced distance - as sex is for me communication and I sort of know why it’s missing here but I don’t really; even if I feel there are still some bricks in the wall erected between us; even if I wonder, sometimes, if I will ever kiss him again and, as I already know the likely answer, I have to suppress the tears; even if I still wonder why can’t he love me; even though I know it’s not the right question.
Paradoxically, the goodbyes of this month come back to mind. This time the words of the Man in the Attic resound louder and louder... “trust the process”, because this process is negotiated without reduction of complexity but rather embracing the depths of concreteness of love over its abstractness. And as the Man with the Cheshire Smile kept saying, without believing it, “everything will be alright”. And I will believe both of them, even though they are both gone.
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