He was footprints in the snow.

Not all loves are meant to last.
Some are meant to grace you briefly,
before fading,
somehow leaving the impression
that the world is just a little bit better
because you had been touched by
something so beautiful it was impossible
to grasp.

Empty Spaces

I wanted to feel less.
To not be burdened by emotion,
To not feel sadness,
To not know loss.
I envied the inanimate,
The trees that stand proudly in winter,
Not missing their leaves.
I wanted to be weightless,
To not experience limitation.
I didn’t want time to pass,
The blur of days, months, years.
It moved too quickly,
I wanted to grasp on,
Hold it.
It eluded me,
Intangible,
Like light.
I wanted to preserve life before you were gone.
I didn’t want to know grief.

But the pain kept me connected.
It meant that I loved you,
It meant that I would always be a little broken,
It meant that our love filled all of the empty spaces.
It meant that you would be with me... forever.

I suffer from chronic nostalgia. Looking back makes me dizzy, queasy, and I yearn for it, ache for it. I want it back; maybe the homesickness will leave then.

But it’s not the way I remember it. I long for a past that I didn’t have, for the same experiences with different emotions, without the pain, without the ambivalence, without the fear. My heart remembers two different lives and I long for the one I can only see now, in retrospect.

She wasn’t broken.
She was made up of a thousand tiny little cracks.
She was always trying to keep herself glued together.
But it was hard, she felt too much.
No matter what she did, her emotions seeped through,
sometimes in drips, other times in floods,
She felt everything,
the heaviness of the clouds right before rain,
the rush of the subway cars as they left the station,
the feeling of goodbye as she watched someone walk away,
wondering if it was the last time she would see them,
the feeling of a kiss lingering on her cheek for hours.
She felt the loneliness of the sun as it hung in the sky,
shedding light on the day,
without companion.

And she longed to give as much as the sun.
If she could brighten someone’s day,
bestow warmth were there was cold,
make someone smile, give someone hope,
then for a minute, an hour, maybe even a day,
the cracks would fill with love
and the pain would become only a voice,
reminding her that her pain was important.
She knew how fragile life was, how hard,
and how precious.

She wanted to feel it all.

We must love those close to us, all the time, every day. Moments only happen once. Make them matter.

The great love is gone. There are still little loves - friend to friend, brother to sister, student to teacher. Will you deny yourself comfort at the hearthfire of a cottage because you may no longer sit by the fireplace of a palace? Will you deny yourself to those who reach out to you in hopes of warming themselves at your hearthfire?