As We Were

If you think unrequited love is bad, try living with the knowledge that there's someone out there, walking the face of the world, who loves you down to your sinews, yet you cannot be with them, may never be with them. And I'm not talking some bullshit, long distance courtship, where the parties involved have never even met and only pine for the best versions of each other. I'm talking about a love that has already been, and then shelved. Two star-crossed lovers who used to fuck the sweat out of each other, who would spend entire days rolling in the sheets like a pair of puppies, who never tired of the chase, or coy glances, or treating one another with surprise delights. Where conversation was never boring and the silences even more interesting. The perfect melding of physicality and mentality. The indefectible trust, the kind that one usually only finds within oneself, if ever. To have all of that, then bury it down a deep and dark hole, preserving it without so much as the basest of funerary rites, stuffing it away without any expectation of revival—though there would be several fumbling attempts over the years before all hope was truly lost. This is the most tragic of all loves, the love that was never broken, the promises still holding, iron-clad like blood oaths but seemingly impossible to keep, and that seemingliness being the real curse of it all, a sputtering candle in a forlorn cabin in a deep wood, not abandoned, never forgotten, only hidden away. And meanwhile time, that cunted bastard, absolutely ravages both parties but still that flame burns! Both can see it from their respective sides of the forest, and neither mourn for nothing has yet been lost. Only paused, put in stasis, perhaps one day to resume in the twilight hours of life, when they will reunite and through rheumy eyes gaze once more at hearts triumphant.

2023.10.25


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