For Love, I Would Break My Heart.
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When I was 19, I fell in love. I searched the small country town I was living in, the place of my childhood explorations and adolescent growth, for a jeweler capable of crafting what I sought: a diamond and amethyst engagement ring.
On a spring dawn, as the sun glowed iridescent as its rays played in the morning mist, I drove my love to a secluded woodland and asked her to share the rest of her life with me. Beautiful, romantic… wrong.
When I was 23, I fell in love. My heart was rent from my chest, a cavernous void excavated from somewhere in my lower sternum, as she departed.
Three months she would leave me for — three months in the warm, citrus-lined streets of Seville — expanding her knowledge and experiences, invigorating her life, weeping to me of missing and longing five times a week on a crackling line from the Spanish country town, denying herself the adventure in the mourning for what she had left behind and, in turn, cradling in her arms a handful of the soul she had torn from my stomach, severed irreparably.
She returned after just six weeks, fell into my arms and I into her eyes. We kissed, we made love, we laughed… we broke up six months later.
When I was 25, I fell in love. This was it, this was the one — my best friend, my confidant, my equal. She left for Australia — an obligatory, post-university annum exploration. She was going to my homeland, my birthright, the place of my father’s childhood and bloodline — without me.
The feeling returned, the missing, nameless internal organs taken with her in her carry-on, leaving me with no joy, no life, replaced with an ocean of sorrow.
Six weeks later, I joined her. We were together again, in love, complete. We traveled, experienced, explored, gave birth, got married — we had it all… until we divorced.
I regret ever having fallen in love all those many previous times, only because I regret having wasted the years and emotions and broken the hearts of the ones I have been blessed to love. At the time, they have been everything to me.
I couldn’t have imagined being without them and my love and eyes and body would never stray.
I was in love, as I told them again and again, as much to comfort them as to convince myself that everything we had together bore its distinctive hallmarks.
It fitted the mold, fulfilled the concept, mimicked the trashy novels, embodied the songs we shared in nocturnal embrace, reflected the projections of the silver screen, emulated all we saw around us of love and union. I have never said I love you and not meant it with all my heart.
But, while I didn’t know it then, what I meant wasn’t love at all.
We are, from a very early age, prescribed the notion of love. From billboards and magazines, the concept is projected upon our subconscious. Music is steeped in romance and broken-hearted loss of its perfection.
We are told what it is, how it feels, what it looks like and given the blueprints of how a life in love is mapped out.
But how can something so organic, so magical and undefinable, be taught or learned or conceptualized? Love is not a theory, it has no map, it does not abide by rules or rationality. Like the earthly elements we hopelessly try to predict, love is beyond us.
It occurs when we least expect it, carries us to places we fear, transports us to lost worlds, gives us the unimaginable and can take twice as much. To try to create love, to actively seek it, to force it in any way is to destroy it before it has even begun.
The very idea of penning this piece, as I search the depths of my soul for the emotions and learnings I now have been gifted, is utter hypocrisy. Love is, in the words I myself wrote just a minute ago, undefinable. And yet here I continue, hoping to lay definition to the ephemeral wonder of it.
I join so many — musicians, artists, poets and scribes — who have desperately sought to convey the absolute that love bestows upon us. But now I have learned, it can’t be done.
I thought I had loved a dozen times. Every experience I had, I convinced myself it was love. This feels like it, this looks like it, I want this person and I choose them above all others. But love cannot be chosen.
We are not the ones who love. Love uses us to convey its passion. We are at its mercy, as we are to the tempestuous tides and cyclonic winds. It cannot be stopped or molded, it cannot be governed or reasoned with.
It will do whatever the hell it wants and there’s not a thing we can do but submit to its wishes.
So now, as I write this, I truly believe, in the wake of mourning, in the mire of broken hearts, in the shadow of innumerable, painful lessons learned and the wisdom of hindsight, that I am in love.
But why, given all those other times in which I was so adamant of its presence, do I feel that this is the Holy Grail, the Shangri La, the mystical ‘it’ that moulds our lives from infancy to decrepitude?
This is love because I will love this person when all attraction is lost. This is love because I finally understand how those poor, ravaged victims of spousal abuse can’t let go or walk away.
This is love because she could suffer the most brutal and disfiguring of diseases or injuries and it wouldn’t lessen by a single heartbeat. This is love because I want to kiss her dying lips at the end of life and slip into the void with her, no less in love than the very first moment.
This is love because every day I fall a little further.
But above all, this is love because I would let it all go, because I love so far beyond myself that now I would rend my own heart, I would reach deep within my stomach and tear out a handful of my own soul, I would offer them as sacrifice and I would give my love away in a heartbeat to give the one I love a better life.
Just as we cannot control love, just as it is beyond our meager realms of comprehension, so too love will never be about us.
We are not in love, we are borne upon its winds and currents and love, true love, the love of Shakespearean gravity and Neitzchean profundity, can only ever be for another soul.
When we find that absolute love, there is not a single thing we can do about it, and it is in knowing that there is no possible way we could live without it but no possible way we would keep it for ourselves, that we know it is real, because real love can only ever be about another — beyond our well-being and happiness, beyond our dreams and wishes.
For love, I would break my heart.
*****
Thomas Leitch emigrated to Byron Bay, on the mid-east coast of Australia, from the UK, in 2000. A range of different jobs brought him to managing a sports DVD distribution company where, in conjunction with a film premiere he had organized, he wrote his first article. Despite no formal journalism education, the article was so well-received that he was asked to create several further pieces for various magazines. A year spent as contributing and online editor for Australia’s Surfing Life magazine gave him a unique and in-depth insight into the industry and his freelance career expanded. Now, under the moniker of SubCutanea, Thomas works from home creating websites, graphic design and writing for a range of online and print sources for local, national and international businesses and magazines.
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