Chasing the sun. (Preface)

[Vegas. A girl and a boy try anxiously to locate each other in the middle of the crowded Strip. And as their eyes settle on the vision they were so eager to encounter, time seems to slow down, the air becomes still and everything around them seems to draw in… something bigger than life is about to become part of them. Forever.]

This is a story about love... but it is not a love story. 

It is a story made of sad cliches just like this first sentence. It is a story to tell how, as he turned his back and drove down the palm tree road,  he took with him her light, her life, her love. 

She would never forget him... She would always love him... She would always want to not love him. 

The self-assured, innocent joy she was once known for would never return unchanged to her soul. She laughed, she smilled, she was still kind, but her eyes couldn't keep the sadness away from them. The tears were now too easy. The sudden loss of the love he once promised her was there at all times... in her brown iris behind the sunglasses. The smell of dill and a sunset on the hill were painful pleasures, a self-inflicted torture that turned her look into a muddy lake of sorrows. 

She had loved before. She had hurt before. This time though, she knew she had been robbed of more than a few months of joy. Her love was wasted till the last drop. Till the last happy cry. Till the last hint of life was sucked out of her. For a moment then she thought the pain would consume her, throwing her into this abyss of unknown agonies. Ending it all, finally crashing against the ground, was a liberating thought... A final and sweet release from a despair that could not be told, that she could not bear to think she would ever feel again. Her life, her eyes, her heart, as she knew them, were forever lost. 

  

Friends would assure her the pain was not forever. They were right. The maniac driving despair didn’t stay forever. It made her grow. Made her learn more than she wanted to know about herself and others. Made her appreciate that love can hurt like nothing else hurts and makes one feel everything in the eeriest, purest, cruelest way… as if straight from the origins of it all! Those panicked times made her learn but, thankfully, didn't stay forever. Sadly though, she was sure, like one can only be sure of things one can't explain, that with the end of the "us", the "we" she dreamed together with his dreams, she would forever be missing a big piece of herself. That spark, that could once be seen, was taken from her body in deep sighs of longing, of sorrow, of loss. The happy times were momentary scenes of madness now, while she was high and lost in wine. Life would go on... The world would keep madly spinning on... Someday she would be loved again and smile about it all... But the love, the pain of that lost love, would stay somehow. Maybe quiet, maybe silent, maybe muted, but always there. Hurting like a chronic wound that we learn to live with but that we never forget it's there.  

Them, as lovers,  had come down. He could not stay in such great heights where everything looked perfect from far up!  The freckles in their eyes no longer aligned. They were no puzzle pieces from the clay no more.  And the elipsis, to their promised union, was forever lost! 

The stories are known about the ones that would sell their souls to the devil to reach for power... She, instead, traded her soul for love! She traded all her life adventures, all her joy, friends, family, desires and hopes for that greater than life love... That ecstasy of gold! Her biggest problem, she realized, was that her body lived in this world, full of fears and anguish, so cowardly suspicious and cynical about anyone who surrenders to love. Her soul, though, lived in a movie, a pink bubble where every realization of love was an epiphany for life, where a flawed character was not a mistake and where quirky, sweet and intense details made one go slow-motion as if to make sure we are ready to take a picture and take a mental note of a life-changing glance.

The memories, of uncounted sunsets and shared glasses of wine on long evenings of restless communion that turned nights into days and seconds into lifelong pleasures, would follow her wherever she went... The comparisons would strain relationships to come. The fear would kill them all. 

You only live once because you can only love once. This LOVE. This frantic, mad, sinful and ingenuous love! It was all gone. One love! One life! In a whirlwind of crazy despairs and un-named fears it was all gone. Simple pleasures of intricate feelings that wouldn't please no more. Kind hopes of unholy wishes that would turn sour... And cinic... And sad. The red colors of the California sunsets would still take her breath away but her soul was no longer filled by them. A cliche hole was there at all times... Tormenting her soul and her thoughts, her hopes and her words. His final, brutal words still echoed in her head. She could still taste her despair and her maniac reactions. It came to her like a nightmare... Dark dreams to  remind her that great happiness might have its downfall. All great love has potential for destruction. All highs can become deep lows. Love became her dark paradise... home, her lost refuge. 

This is a story about love... But it is not a love story.


(...to be continued...)




"And I have to speculate
That God himself did make 
Us into corresponding shapes
Like puzzle pieces from the clay.

And true it may seem like a stretch
But it's thoughts like this that catch
My troubled head when you're away
When I am missing you to death."

       Ben Gibbard and Jim Tamborello