What do you do if the person you love, the person you pledge
your soul to morphs physically and emotionally at the hands of a disease like
cancer or dementia or even addiction? Does love cover all bases? Are we
expected to stick around when life shows up, reality reads like a horror story,
and smiles are caught for instants, like butterflies in the wind.
It is important, at least for me, to believe in that
perfect, mindblowing love. It might take years and labyrinths to find it, but
once the puzzle pieces click together, nothing else in the world really
matters. Your minds are in sync as you finish each other’s sentences, your skin
responds like lightning to one another’s touch, your bodies provide warmth,
arousal, safety. You whisper to each other in the quiet of the night, mumbling
words like “love” and “you” and “forever” against each other’s skin.
When you walk together in the light of day, your hands seek
each other out. Your proximity decreases to the point where you begin to nearly
walk as one.
When you are separated, whether it be between walls or
continents, you feel disconnected, not just from your lover but from yourself.
When you define yourself by your love for another, when that love is gone, even
for a moment, it changes you. You struggle with every step, every breath.
Is love worth sticking around for when it becomes
unrecognizable? When the love that looked so bright and alive, skin olive
against the emerald of the grass becomes starchy, like the color of the sheets
it rests against, what about then? When the breath that provided loud and
hearty laughs and kisses that seem to last for days suddenly can barely
sustain, coming out labored and shallow, what then? When your lover can barely
see you, barely recognize you, when you see just fleeting pieces of who they
were, what then?
When they are begging you to carry them, but you have lost
the lover to carry your own weight, what then?
