The Way This Ends

Paraphrased, love is patient, kind, a mind fuck. That's all.

Love looks simple. Treading water in the Sea of Love looks easy. We dive headfirst into the idea of love. We leap in with cinderblocks tied to our ankles — those concrete things we think we know about the world, what we want, what we know about people. Things like decency, fairness, honesty, vulnerability. We jump in as fools and try to keep our heads above water. Love swallows us, pulls us under. We drown. We sink alone to the cold, dark bottom.

Is this the way love feels? Is this the way this ends?

The Sea of Love rejects us, too, heaving our lifeless corpses back onto the beach. We're spit out again like a bad taste. Tossed back, rather mercifully. You feel dead. But how can that be when every nerve wretches, aches?

And there, transformed into something unrecognizable, soaked and caked in sandy grit, we shiver our way out of the fog. Long breaths punctuate the pain. But only for a while. Our breath grows quiet with everything else. The rhythm of self reasserts itself. We scour the surf for pieces of ourselves. We stub our toes on the very cinderblocks that took us to the bottom of the watery hell: our expectations and ideas. Like shoes, we lace them back onto our feet.  The chains are hard to tie, but we manage to make the necessary knots. We're dumb and determined, you see. They're our expectations, our ideas. We claim them. Own them. We find our feet and leave, horrified.

Forever changed, so it goes.

The beach behind us only a few yards, the awful experience fresh in our hearts and minds, we can't wait to try again. So we look back, hopeful.