Someone's Pain

It is said that the realization that you're losing the person you love more than anyone or anything you've ever known is excruciating. That doing so through a slow process of evaporation of feelings, and a leakage of those comfortable moments that were so special, is the worst pain imaginable. And that the anguish is only magnified when that love never had the chance it deserved to blossom.

The pain is described as a choking, claustrophobic, systematic crushing of your heart, like a boa constrictor squeezing the life and love out of your soul. And as this love slips further and further away, it is replaced by a yawning emptiness and desolation, like some snowy wind swept plateau in the Antarctic.

Your tears are gone again, the ducts dried out from overuse. All that remains is the shaking, and sobbing, and gagging, and dry heaving, whose ugly sounds echo through your emotional cell and keep you company.

They say that you feel like there is no hope ahead - no vision of a future filled with happiness. The planets were all aligned, your lottery numbers came in, the tumblers fell into place and the locks around your heart opened for the first time ever. God blessed you with this unimaginably special person in your life, only to pull her slowly away to remind you of the lesson your cancer was supposed to have taught you - to serve the one you vowed to, even if it was a mistake.

Oh, you know there may be some small smiles ahead, maybe grandchildren and a few more weddings. A funny movie perhaps. And you will both remain dear and trusted friends. But nothing will ever again reach that place that is in us all, the one that radiates with joy merely being in that special someone's presence, with no words or gestures needed. You just know that is where you are supposed to be.

It seems that looking back becomes less painful than the void ahead. Numbness eventually becomes it's own perverted kind of comfort, to be shared with the one next to you, like some furtive glance to a stranger you pass in a dark, rain soaked, debris filled back alley.

In a pattern all too familiar in a jaded world; fear and uncertainty have conquered love again, and two people that should be happy aren't.

To paraphrase a military term, your life, your head, your heart and this world are FUBAR. Fucked up beyond all reality. Hope is anathema. This is all there is.

So it's said. Hopefully, it's only heresay.