Notes on Unfinished Love
or, 'maybe it just goes on forever'
thank you for reading! please tap the heart if this resonates with you - it helps boost my work in the ecosystem. take care <3
around this time of year, at the edge of my saturn return, my life had started crumbling from the inside out. repeated heartbreaks had left me ragged and aching, but as the days got shorter, i met a beautiful human - a musician, poet, educator. a person made of art, with melancholy and earnestness that mirrored my own.
through the late fall, i would finish some combination of my three jobs and take the Jersey Transit to see her, a 45-minute ride that never passed quickly enough. i usually think of myself at some intersection of greyace and demisexual, which means it’s rare that i experience attraction to people, but the first time i saw her broke open a whole new spectrum of colors in me…once, she wrote ‘you are the softest part of black’, and i was happy to be where i was because how long had it been since someone had seen me like that? we made poetry and played, danced, took care of each other, made music, and laughed so much. i did not feel shame, did not have to feel less or be less, could be the one learning for once.
it ended. the why is sad, and the aftermath is messy. but we’re both better now, mA.
the thing on my mind tonight (it’s 3am) is what it means to be a custodian of the love the Universe has for a person.
our separation was abrupt and i had to watch them make choices that i knew would hurt them. sometimes we are our own biggest enemies. i remember that winter in an almost-greyscale, on autopilot without an escape to the warmth of house parties and living room studios, wrapped in a fog of my grief. i had not softened - the large pieces of paper from my walls show defiance, resentment, power with no purpose.
when i tried to take some of that raw, grief-fueled energy and put it toward things, use it…stained…everything. and yet, i could not bring myself to smother it, to pretend that i hadn’t become what i had, or learned what i knew. changed. i couldn’t bring myself to renounce the loving.
i decided to tell myself a different story:
there is love in the Universe for all of us. some of us are bearers of the love for others, and that love exists whether they interact with it or not. that bearing is real. the holding, growing, changing, protecting, even releasing, of that love, is real, whether they can appreciate it or not.
my love is inherently valuable.
a much different hue.
stay brave,
seph