Love is not the Destination
Only How We Get There
It happened one day ... the way most monumental things do, slowly and then all at once.
It felt more like artwork than conversation, the way you shifted from a stranger to the sole purpose of my beating heart. The way I fell for your certainty. Of how sure you were in what the future held. How it gave me solace in my own life, at a time when I was lost, and looking to be found.
My heart had been so bemused by you. The confidence you displayed when you answered my questions. The way your mind was always geared towards fixing things, rather than understanding them. The way your heart was always in the right place around the wrong people. That you were the type of man I never saw myself falling for, and simultaneously the one I never pictured leaving.
And yet, falling for you and watching us fall apart were the only two parts of our story that I was certain of and somehow never saw coming.
In many ways, I assumed that if love were enough, it would find a way to save us. In many ways I hoped you’d be the knight in my story when I felt like the disoriented civilian.
They often tell you that love is made up of passion and sparks and chemistry that creates diamonds where there were once only stones. But I realize now, that love is so much more than a feeling.
Love in many ways is not the answer, but the question.
It’s a matter of who you are at the very moment you’re presented with it.
To love someone is to think you know yourself, and to leave them is to realize that you don’t.
And it’s heartbreaking and unfair in ways that shift from mental pains to physical ones. It’s the suffering of losing your best friend and torture of trying to rationalize if he had actually ever been. It’s the anxiety of your newfound loneliness and the remorse that comes when you start to feel like you’ve made the wrong choice.
It’s the million things everyone will tell you, of how they’re sorry for your sadness or how they too understand. It’s a crossroads between the mourning of a loss and the longing for a better future.
And many will be quick to list out the reasons that you’re better off for leaving. Many will be swift in deciding who the hero is and who’s the villain. And somehow, none of them will tell you… that you’re both at fault.
Because love is also a choice. It’s is a decision that’s made everyday between two people and between oneself.
Love is not a thing that happens, but a sensation that you let happen. A door that you allow to open, regardless of whether or not it started off closed. Love is a reflection of who you are, of how you see yourself, of what you fundamentally believe in.
And so, I loved you. With every fiber of my being.
I loved you with emotions and thoughts and actions and prayers that never existed in me before I fell for you.
And it wasn’t one day, but over a string of time, when I started to understand that loving me and loving you didn’t intertwine. When the reality set in, that maybe the reason things had been so difficult was because loving you felt like a destination, and I was starting to see that I was meant for a longer journey.
I’ve been told it’s called ‘falling out of love’ but the truth is, it was nothing like that.
I fell more in love. I fell for the dreams I hadn’t realized I was longing for, and the person I never expected to become. I fell for the beliefs that were cultivating in my heart, and the new experiences I discovered were so near to my reach. I realized I was craving a path I knew wouldn’t make you happy, and a life I couldn’t ask you to promise me.
And I spent so much of my life asking the wrong questions. So when you stood in front of me looking so much like the answer I had been searching for, I convinced myself that my forever was waiting in the depth of your eyes.
But not every story is made up of a hero and a villain. Not every love ends because it’s been sinisterly damaged beyond repair.
I thought love was the purpose, the landing place, the destination. But it turns out love was the pathway; a door I had opened because I believe it held the answer, only to find I needed to continue walking towards a more pressing question.
I realize now that I had been waiting a lifetime for the permission to go towards the life I really wanted. And it was you who made me realize the permission was only mine to give.
I thought love would give me guidance. I thought companionship would give me the strength to move forward. I thought ambition would prove contagious.
But it was only after finding the perfect accomplice that I discovered that some journeys are meant to be embarked on alone.
If love were a movie, falling for you was the beginning. And if love were enough, it might have been the end as well. But love is not the destination, only how we get there. So I’ve come to understand how you and I could have been meant to find one another, and never destined to be each other’s happily ever after.
