Love, unlived.
A couple falls apart due to the death of a child. A mother loses her infant child. A man breaks up with her girlfriend he loves because she kissed someone else in the heat of the moment. A girl misses her sister because she moved a thousand miles away for her career. There are so many stories in the world in which two people never quite get to experience love to its full extent because life happens to them.
When we think about love we either think about all the happy stories where the couple, or the family, or the friends are happy and get to experience love on a regular basis, or we think about the sad stories of cheating, deceit, and falling apart. But what about all the stories that never quite get to be written? What about the nascent stories that end abruptly because a butterfly flapped its wings a million miles away? The stories that never really get to be what they could’ve become if only…
Such are the stories of love that are truly heartbreaking. These stories make our hearts ache because they are made of people who never quite get closure. Their hearts crave and long for the last sentence in the novel so they can keep the book down and move on to another book but all they get is a worn-out book with never-ending pages as if the book personifies the rabbit hole into which Alice goes. And with every page, their hearts bleed a little more and the pages turn from white to yellow to red.
When such couples fall apart, there is no unreasonable yelling at anyone’s part. When such a mother suddenly loses her child, there is no time to prepare for the coming storm. When such siblings are separated, there is no one to move on to and the distance becomes the devil that slowly pulls them apart.
The only thing that the protagonists of these painful stories get is life advice that tells them to move on even before they have started grieving properly. And the only thing they want is to feel the love that they know now they shall never be able to feel.
Now, you may read this and say that sure they can feel love by moving on and loving someone else. And eventually, they do love someone and live happy lives. Happy lives with the remnants of unhappy memories. But whoever they end up loving, it is a different love. We can love two different people but those two loves will be vastly different. Both may end up making you happy and fulfilled and satisfied but at their core, they are different loves and you know that. You can always feel that difference.
One of the greatest tragedies of life is to be a part of such tragic love stories. And maybe, each one of us will feel such pain at some point in our lives. But that is the price we pay for living and more importantly, for loving. It seems easy to write about this but I cannot imagine the pain of actually living through such a painful story and experiencing such love whose pain is like a labyrinth with no exit.
It breaks my heart to see people go through a perpetual state of sorrow and incompleteness. The clock keeps ticking and their melancholic hearts yearn for a love that is and shall always remain… unlived.
