This is how you count your loss

Originally published on medium.com

 

When you pack up one day and leave your relationship, you don’t imagine life on the edge, close enough to tip over. You don’t imagine yourself taking a deep plunge into a bottomless pit. You don’t stop to think it over that one day, your courage, your faith in yourself, will fail you. When you pack up and leave that relationship, it is a force beyond you that propels you.

Why do we love? Why do we choose to let out our heart to some stranger? Why do we learn to sing the song of love, to dance the dance of love, to dish out trust on chinawares, to convince ourselves that this is eternity? Why is it so easy to let go of ourselves?

When, one day, you realize that there is nothing more to fight for, and you pick up whatever piece that is left of you, and you head out, no one tells you that you will hurt, that you will turn into something you yourself do not recognize, that what will be left of you is a dizzying emptiness. No one tells you that you will hover around your phone every minute of the day waiting for your phone to vibrate, waiting for a message to beep in, or for an email offering explanations to arrive. No one tells you that nights will become nightmares, that days will become terrors and your memories will haunt you out of yourself. No one teaches you to nurse your wounded self back to sanity. No one teaches you that what causes you so much joy has the capacity to cause you so much pain, in equal measure. No one tells you that you will hurt and you will heal. No one ever tells you this: that as broken and shattered as you are, you may never be able to sing that song of your childhood again.

No one ever tells you this: that as broken and shattered as you are, you may never be able to sing that song of your childhood again.

Love arrives, sometimes like a whisper, sometimes like a whirlwind. It blows you away, tells you to forget the voice of truth, teaches you to live your life dancing in castles, suspends all your fears and anxieties, drowns the voices of people whom you once loved. Love carries you like a bird, right on her wings, right into her abode. Points into the skies and names the colours of the rainbow. Points into the dark and names every one of the stars. Points into your heart and names your fears to you. Names your fears one by one and teaches you to swallow them, to open your mouth wide and drink them all in. 

Love heals.

Love brings.

But Love also takes away.

Love always takes away.

 

Writer: Munachim Amah (Winner, 2017 Writivism Short Story Prize for his short story “Stolen Pieces”)

 

P.S: Munachim Amah is a friend whose writings I will describe as “dialogue with our benign nature.” Thanks for always being an inspiration. Click here to check his blog