Discovery of Your Endless Changes

As I sit here, I wonder how he’s changed. I wonder how his life and energy and friends and path are so unimaginably different than how he was with me. My memories serve up delicious bites of energy that feel good and comfortable. Many things I’m sure are the same. And yet, in reality, he’s also different. He has to be different. We’re different.

Time has gone by. New experiences have been had. Life has twisted and turned us upside down. Our energy no longer dances and entangles like two fractals blending into a beautiful new design. Instead, we angle out; journeying on solitary paths and mixing with the energy of new and old friends, new and old ideas. These energies blend to form a new field. One with a different feel and hue. Unknown by the other.

I feel fear. Will I ever know him again? Have I been living in some delusional fantasy of possibility; yearning for something that is no more? When I arrive here at this question, at this point, anger usually ensues.

It’s one thing to sense and know inevitable changes are afoot in the field of another. It’s a whole other thing to realize that one may never get the privilege and honor in sharing in the discovery of those changes. At least, not ever again. Not in the way we did before. This is my greatest fear. It’s gutwrenching. It leaves a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach. And yet I’m maddeningly curious about it.

It feels reckless to ignore this reality. My whiskers sense there’s something here at the end of this rabbit hole. Move towards fear, they say. Because certainly ignoring my fear only stokes the fire. But what’s there at the end of it? What if it were true? What if knowing him in that way was no longer meant for me but reserved only for someone else?

My heart would break even deeper than it did before. My heart would break, and I’d assume it would eventually stop breaking. Yet, I can’t help but think about the stories of writers I’ve heard over the years who have known great love and lost great love, whether it be the love of a person or a great city and way of life. Love lost to early death or lost to exile, never to know love in that form ever again.

In one of these stories, love is never found again. The writer is stuck in a loveless wasteland, isolated in the loneliness of his own life. In the other story, the writer eventually discovers that a new love of life can be reborn from the ashes, despite taking on a whole new form. The former is the story of stagnation. I can’t imagine myself being there, although I’m partial to long meanderings through tough territory; there’s always so much to learn. But I believe in my resiliency.

So in the latter story, I find hope and inspiration. Even in his darkest of days this man got out of bed and put one foot in front of the other. Until one day he discovered the truth that even in the midst of such great tragedy, exile, nearly a form of death for him, he could create his greatest works in life. A new kind of love formed.

At the bottom of my fear, I can find a rebirth, should I be so willing to allow myself to move through it completely. I see now that it is not the death and rebirth that I am afraid of but stagnation; to be stuck in a loveless wasteland, a desert of unending despondency, pining for what is no longer. It is stagnation that gives me the sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach.

To be the one made foolish in love long gone. To be left behind. To harbor remnants when not a scrap was left in his hands. This possibility aches. It reeks of a warm, putrid odor.

But I don’t know if it’s me alone. And I don’t want to find out. I stand here thinking of only how to save myself. It’s the only thing I can do. I must turn the other way and look in a new direction. I must take aim and go where the energy is free and flowing, where it smells of roses and lilies and the wind blows warm on my soft skin.

I seek out a horizon. A place where I can let my consciousness expand, enabling all possibilities for this life, particularly the ones that feel good and include a vision of great love. A home, a family, a partner I adore, and creative juices overflowing. My mind may frequently wander in listless states of wonder of what was and what might have been. But what I want next will be new. New to me for endless discovery.

Photo by Eli DeFaria on Unsplash