She often thought that, in a morbid way, loving someone was like death.
The parts of yourself that you reveal and give, wrapped in silver tinsel and flowered paper, can be broken, stolen, or returned worse for wear.
Sometimes love waters the beautiful parts of people, allowing them to grow and twine their way into everyone’s smile. However, the same effect can be gained by the famine that rejection brings, drying the beautiful parts until they are no more than the
husk of the darkest humanities seeping into snarls.
What makes love dangerous, is the allure of how easily you could get hurt, rejected, tossed carelessly aside, or broken, but you’re taking a chance on another human being having the compassion not to abandon you in the gutter along with every other heart they have wrung dry.
The trees we carve with hearts and initials are almost like our tombstones, waiting for the date to be scribed underneath, of when he stopped loving her eyes or she stopping drying his tears.
Our memories are deposited regretfully at the sites we have marked with our love, the diner where he first saw her drinking coffee, the library where they shared their first kiss, the grassy patch where they lounged and discussed their children and wedding. The memories and emotions we leave in these places are the fragrant lilies and roses stained with our tears that we drop at the grave site; allowing ourselves to be overcome with the sting of losing someone forever.
After you lose the emotional connection with someone that can rarely be re-forged, you go through the grieving process that’s special and selective for every individual. The length and intensity of the grieving stages varying on amount of betrayal, nostalgia, affection, broken trust, and anger that came with the initial passing. Sometimes it’s the denial stage that clings, your mind intent that they will walk back into your life next Tuesday like a maelstrom hasn’t wreaked your lives.
So, in a morbid way, she often thought that loving someone was like attending a funeral to look at a mirror box, with your heart nestled inside someone else’s hands.