Love and Loss

Wrestling With an Unhearing Soul

I met my first love right before my thirteenth birthday. He was sixteen. He had blue eyes, not the bright blue kind that have light dancing around in them, but the smoky blue kind, shrouded and troubled. And he had a set of creases in his forehead that bespoke a frame of mind associated with people at least three times his age. He lived with his grandmother. I never asked him why.

I didn’t consciously take in any of those details about him, but a part of me “understood.” My heart was split open and in some inexplicable way I became bound up in his life, though he didn’t even know it. The love-ache in my heart lasted for years. He had no idea I was waiting for him as he went away to serve in the military or that I was waiting as my tragic, brooding hero made his way through a failed marriage and divorce. I waited because I was smitten and I was treading the depths of first love, keeping my head above water, hoping he would rescue me from the sea of lovesickness. He did. I was almost sixteen when Richard came to me.

We love stories of first love’s romance, they are fuel to our emotional engines. But there are stories of other first loves that can be just as enthralling; passionate love of a dream or a calling, an innovative idea that consumes us, even a place or an experience that captures our hearts. We feel so deeply; we long for and desire so intensely.

There is no love without desire and there is no desire without the possibility of loss. Loss brings pain. I lost a dream once. It took ten years to recover, but that’s a story for another time.

We have always wrestled with questions of loss, pain and suffering. How can we possibly reconcile the beauty of life’s possibilities with the wasting sorrow of loss?

We have always had cycles and rhythms and seasons: a time to live, a time to die, a time to gather, a time to cast away. We have always had conflicting energies in the world, juxtapositions, points and counterpoints. I understand all of that intellectually. It’s the wounded heart I’m concerned with. When we have loved with all our might, believed with all our strength, held on for all we’re worth and then the fall – what then? What does the path forward look like; is it loveless, fearful of risk?

Love is at the heart of everything. It can’t be wrong to love. That will not change. What then? Maybe another look at love and its passion, another look at what love means; love in the world, in me, through me and to me. Love’s wine takes time to age, especially the unselfish part, the letting go part. It’s the young self that demands that the world make sense; that pines for an answer as though that will somehow alleviate the pain.

Sometimes when we do and should ask questions, we end up asking the wrong questions, the yes or no kind, or the equivalent, the ones that fit nicely into our box. Those are the easy questions to ask. In asking them we can justify our rage at the pat answers that present themselves. It takes patience and courage to wrestle an untested question “down to the mat,” to be willing and even hungry for the unorthodox answers that may come. It takes bravery to cross the threshold of the unknown.

What answers have not yet been seen, heard or spoke out loud because they are waiting for a brave champion to ask the hard questions?

Writing Prompt for the Week: A Lost Dream