There was an idiot a long time ago who said
it’s better to have loved and lost
than never to have loved at all.
These are the words of a man who didn’t love fully,
who didn’t wake up in the morning
and spend the next eighteen hours
in a kind of stupor as thought after thought
of a woman he loved soul-deep
kept running through his head like a slideshow.
These are the ramblings of a man who had
never lost that kind of love,
never had that slideshow on repeat every waking moment,
never saw himself in all the love songs
that suddenly were all about him.

That quote has done a great disservice to those of us
who have loved so deeply and lost that love even deeper,
the soul turned into a bottomless well of limitless proportions.
Light never travels very far down there,
the thick tarry blackness snuffs out all illuminations.
And the echoes of the memories you created
rebound and recoil in the dark, the great voice
of a forgotten earth god trembling all who fall too close,
a hungry, vindictive, spiteful creature
who devours the souls of the dead-but-still-just-barely-alive.
If that’s worse than having never been loved at all,
I’m sorry, but that is a crock of ****.