Love can't be found.

Time and peace make us understand that everything is relative, not only to time itself and space, but also the momentary shape of our own heart.

Energy, feelings, emotions, can be greater than life, yet people can be as insignificant as a bored second.

As he called me his raven-haired beam I knew he would never know me but would always love me. I also knew he would leave as quickly as he had whispered little poems in my ear.

To the bodies that followed him, there was no hope. I felt them cold as we shared the night, though their skin felt warm next to mine. As they laid there I wondered how useless this replacement figures could be… there was no pulse, no heart, just a substitute form and an empty soul. 
I kept my eyes shut, trying not to see but his dark, gypsy eyes, his contoured shoulders and his strong hands holding my whole body. But there was nothing. No depth. A void only. A big and absolutely empty void.

I stopped. I cut all ties. I cried.

I used my tears as a cleansing elixir, a liberating potion for soul, body and mind. I needed to get rid of all the negative in me, all the rotten corners of my spirit… get it all through to the outside of me, exorcized in all those sobs of sorrow and relief.
I cried yet again.

As he stopped being the poem I had written, a time finally came to dance to the music that was playing.
Now.

No wishes. No fears. No reservations.
Just love.

That very second, as I wiped my tears, taking a deep breath, I felt love in its purest form and realized, surprised, one can't search for it.

Love is. Everyday. In every jaded second and every falling leaf. In every red sunset by the sea and in the ones hiding behind dark clouds. In the crying newborn and the mumbling old lady. In two lovers kissing and a lonely heart fighting. All is love. It can be felt but it is useless to search for it.

Love can’t be found.

Love just is.

Now.

"Won't you open a window sometime.

 What's so wrong with the light.

 (…)

 We throw our shadows down
 we must throw our shadows down
 we live and throw our shadows down
 it's how we get around
 in the sun."

                                         Angel Olsen

Love.

There was a year that didn’t exist. A year that wasn't as she wasn't either, when she forgot how to be. Herself. Whole. 

On that year that wasn't she would go down by the water and with her back to the Pacific, looking at that vast continent ahead, she would measure all its length with her heart, all the miles, one by one, until it reached another ocean… she knew only after all that land and the immensity of those cold waters of the Atlantic she could find his eyes again. The distance felt too real, too massive… overwhelmingly painful, tearing all her inside apart.

To appease her spirit she decided to drive up north on the Pacific Coast Highway and those hills and cliffs, swept by the pacific waves, made her feel the earthquakes and the landslides, all seemed like small prices to pay for the glories of living in California. There she found a place for her broken heart to be. Without excuses. That truth soothed her pain making everything else seem secondary, less important, less vital. As long as she could see that sun go down and those hills turn to gold she could feel less torn… and forget the distance and how small she was when confronting it.

She got used to her sadness and learned to love it. Alone, in the place that held her soul when she had nothing.

One summer day he came back, calm and gentle, comforting and tender. There was no urgency in his world, no rush, no roller coaster. There wasn't more than what he showed, no surprise. He seemed to have all the love and all the patience in this world… he just existed there in his own space and time, side by side with her, barely making a move and just waiting for her to notice him.

He asked her if she still believed in love and she could smile when telling him she couldn't no more… she had had her share of that self-harming madness, she told him softly. He didn't try to deny her fears nor make her speak the word she couldn't feel. 

She fought the peace he brought as one instinctively wrestles the discomfort of all things unknown.

She wrestled alone as he stood there. Silent. Peaceful. Warm. With no judgment in his eyes nor his voice. Just patiently waiting for her to stop hiding and get back on her own path.

With his whispering voice, as not to frighten her, he lulled her to a quietness she had long lost and guided her back from war… somehow she found her way to those two arms that had been hers before… that had been hers all along.

Unexpectedly she felt something she had forgotten. It was not crazy. Not overwhelming. Not anxious. It was peace… a peace that showered her body, reaching every molecule of her being. She felt home.

He asked her again if she still believed in love. She could just smile then, with no words, as to not scare her heart.

If today was not an endless highway,
If tonight was not a crooked trail,
If tomorrow wasn't such a long time,
Then lonesome would mean nothing to you at all.
Yes, and only if my own true love was waitin',
Yes, and if I could hear her heart a-softly poundin',
Only if she was lyin' by me,
Then I'd lie in my bed once again.

                                                            Bob Dylan

Leaving.

"I will always runaway" you once told me, "There's no happiness in staying… I shall find no space, no love, no time as my witness". That lingered on my thoughts as I replayed it over and over in my head. I eventually stopped, for a break, while traveling to forget your absence and I realized I too prefer to live alone, and leave alone, running away from anyone else's curve of time. I guess we end up having something in common as we are aware we don't want to be found.

Now I travel by night... so love can't find me.

Despite my struggles and hiding efforts, life is how it's lost, not how it's found as all our days are counted already, numbered from sure beginning to certain end.

We are all just passing by and moving towards the same finish line…There's no pause for this time we were given, for the perpetual decline of this limited energy borrowed to us as we get to exist on this spinning mass of rock. Knowing this all, acknowledging it with sadness in the departure of someone dear, makes the sacrifice feel too real, grounding, almost freeing but hurtful as it is constantly so close.

Time can't bring but loss, the great finale we can't escape, and in the silence of each second I want to stop avoiding feeling it all to my core… even the deepest pain… even an overwhelming joy… for it won't come back. Ever. Again. The same.

Now I travel by night… and I am always leaving… as we all are.

We are all just slowly leaving.

"I'm gonna float up in the ceiling

I built a levee of the stars

And in my field of tired horses

I built a freeway through this farce

Well if I ever get that slumber

Ill be that mole deep in the ground

And I won't be found."

                      Tallest Man on Earth

After the storm.

After the storm has passed and the waters of this ocean are calm again, I find myself wondering if you ever think of me, if you ever ask yourself how am I doing... What is my life like... What makes me laugh these days?

Do you ever think of the time we had together and the moments we shared… All the dreams we dared to tell one another and the fantasies we dared to live as one?

Do you ever stop to try and understand my side, who was I then or who I became? What were the choices I had?

Do you ever miss me, dear stranger? Not only as your lover, but as a person you met… as a person that was somehow part of your life?
Was I ever important to you, tell me honestly?

Do you ever question if we will meet again in our lifetime? Will we talk someday? Cry at all this? Laugh? Will our footsteps trail the same path somehow, somewhere, sometime? Will we ever be more than a ghost to each other?

Do you ever wonder if things could be different today… better, maybe?
Did it ever occurred to you that perhaps you could have given me a little more? More time? More compassion?
Did I even truly deserve anything more than what you gave me then? You gave me so much afteral. I am so thankful and yet I am so mad… or sad.

It is all mixed up in my mind to be truthful. It all collapses between my brain and my heart. 

I know I had my reasons to fail, to fail you, to fail everyone… to fail myself in the end. But why did I take it so badly and why did this all have to happen this bitterly?

Was it all a mistake, you believe? Was I, or we, mistaken all along… or when did things become a mistake?

I felt we had something that was magically ours… I thought that nothing, not distance or silence, nor chaos or death, could ever break the connection we shared... everything was little to describe what you were to me. I did believe the two of us, even with all that separated us, had a grace no one else had.
Did these feelings ever made any sense in your mind? When did it stop making sense? Why was that grace lost so instantly? Was it ever there in our hearts?

It is still so confusing and always so disheartening!

I don't know you anymore... and yet I care about you so profoundly. 
You are now a stranger, a shadow only, a silhouette, someone I had to cast away even if I loved you so deeply. 
You became just someone I once knew, a person I had to declare non-grata when I never actually intended to fight this kind of war. And why? Why did I have to fight like this? Because I loved you? Because when your love was gone mine didn't stop existing?... And how did your love fade so fast?... And why did mine persist so strong?

Can loving someone become such a big error? Does it deserve such punishment?

I am sorry, dear stranger.
I am sorry I question so much.
I am sorry I try to guess so far.
I am sorry I loved you.
I am sorry I didn't know how to hate you right when you first said goodbye.
I am sorry I didn't know how to not love…

Sometimes, all you have left in life are but toxic choices.

I am sorry. I am sad. I am sorry.

Forgive me, dear stranger. 

Just forgive me.

"And after the storm,

I run and run as the rains come

And I look up, I look up,

on my knees and out of luck,

I look up.

(…)

And there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears.

And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.

Get over your hill and see what you find there,

With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair."

Ted Dwane, Ben Lovett, Marcus Mumford and Country Marshall.

If life was the movie playing in my head.

Let's go to Vegas tonight... Go out all night, go crazy and wild, play the same cheap slot machines and go back to the hotel room only when the sun is already out. Our tired bodies won't win and we'll have breakfast on that same bar on the Strip, 2 for 1 Coronas and a yard-long margarita to go. The music won't let us sleep by the pool as our restless hands search for one another. It will be perfectly decadent... It will be love.

The dive.

When you love someone, a lover or a friend, that person attains the immediate value of ALL the things and ALL the persons in the world. Their opinion of you becomes an absolute truth, a sentence you uncomplainingly accept for yourself. You become the good and the bad they see in you, the virtue and the evil, the splendor and the insignificance! It is a power you give away. A power that can make you invincible, indestructibly talented, beautiful and capable… but it can also make you absolutely defeated!

She discovered all this the hardest possible way...

When the love that once embraced her was gone and regret took its place, bitterness dominated, making her soul too heavy for the body to carry, too somber, too crushed. Only then she recognized the force of that control she hadn’t noticed was not hers anymore. It was now a losing game when carrying on seemed impossible without that strength.

All of us search for the same understanding, the same comprehension. All of us string ourselves up for love and acceptance, for a bigger than life plan that will reveal the truth and make us recognize, not only all that we have ahead, but also all that we were and went through… a plan that can assure us we were not wasting our young years. This road is but a narrow clifwalk that needs all the balance one can gather.

When she lost the stability she had neatly built, even if just for a moment, when the shoulder she was leaning on was so suddenly gone and that lover she trusted disappeared down a palm tree road, it became momentarily hard to see any kind of bright vision ahead. Abruptly a gloomy feeling embraced all her body grasping deep for what was left of her heart… the darkness was so dense it extinguished all of the light and she briefly stop being. 

The way back to the surface from the deep hole of suffocating loss is a slow ascent, a controlled process of decompression, stage by stage, letting the air and light in gradually and teaching the lungs how to go from shallow to deep normal breaths full of oxygen…full of life. It is a path that must be taken gently to avoid shock… a difficult route to reach again the sunlight and the rainbow colors there is to enjoy... 

She had to learn to grow back to herself. Grow back her bones, her loins, her skin… stand again and walk again, with her own two crooked feet. For too long life lingered like a hazy dark fantasy, until she realized she had to trail alone through the tortuous, unconfident road, if there was any hope of retrieving that lost power… 

…And if she ever gets it back to herself, she will think twice before letting it fly away with anyone, for they one day might be, merely, someone she used to know.

"You wanna climb up the stairs,
I wanna push you back down.
But I let you inside,
So you can push me around.

If I leave before you,
And I walk out alone,
Keep your hands to yourself
When you follow me home.

I don’t want love."

Michael Jay Lerner, Peter Joseph Silberman and Darby Austin Cicci.

If life was the movie playing in my head.

Let's go out tonight, just you and I. Let's dance to some tired 80's songs or a top 40 pop single, drink shots of Patrón and act like teenagers again. We will go home after the music stops, laughing and still dancing while making silly promises to each other. You will give me a piggyback ride up the stairs, to your room and the world will seem ours just this once!