This Is Why I Needed To Let Love Go

 

The day he left, I found myself on a cliff. I was tired and scared. The wind was blowing my coat. I was standing on a cliff and I couldn’t recognize the sea. It was winter in Ireland. The day he left, I couldn’t recognize him anymore. I put my hat on and turned my back to the past, I pulled a shadow costume over my shoulders so that he couldn’t recognize me anymore. The day he left, I saw a smile freezing on his face. It was very cold in Ireland that winter.

When I reached the seashore and looked at the high tides, I couldn’t tell what was purple and what was blue, if the sea was purple or blue, if the sunset was purple or blue, If I was purple or blue. I couldn’t tell the meaning of high tides, sunsets and journeys anymore, I kept quiet for a while for fear I would lose my inner voice. I looked for a while at the high horizon, at the foggy clouds of the future. As if I looking for a while at myself.

The first time I met him I was at the opening of a a concert hall. I was attracted by the headlines of the concert, some far-away musicians playing some instruments that were unknown to me. Needless to say that I was fascinated, I have a deep attraction to the unknown. He was playing some kind of flute and I was hypnotized. There are many possibilities of expressing yourself, but I have a deep respect for those who manage to make me feel something that I cannot describe myself. Maybe the deeper the attraction to someone, the more things that we cannot really utter exist. And then our fingers or our lips or our eyes can say them. And when that person vanishes from our life, it is our memory that starts telling a story.

Life has no plot, it gains a plot in remembrance and imagination.

My grandmother taught me never to run after the bus or after a man. I managed to apply her teaching at least to what concerns the bus. Why run when there will be another one coming?

I go on walking undisturbed watching the bus depart, I light a cigarette and wait. Partially I managed to apply her wise teaching to what concerns men as well, I do not run after them, but sometimes I find myself clinging to a lover. There are so many teachings available out there about the art of letting go, from yoga to self motivational literature, but what I know is that people wouldn’t read or write about these subjects if they did not have trouble letting go themselves. It is oh-so-human to find yourself in such a situation.

When he told me that our relationship has an expiration date, I found myself a bit confused. I had a dream one night in which a crystal was growing inside my head, somewhere close to my right ear. It was crystal clear I was having some trouble hearing the reality.  Was he saying that he doesn’t want me anymore or just that the end is coming soon? People are so contradictory and what tears me apart is that I can see so well through their contradictions, I have a sharp gaze that goes straight to a deep point inside ourselves, where desire and fear and many other feelings mingle. But what should really matter in the art of letting go is the act, the sharp tip of the arrow that reaches us from the other person. If you get lost in the other person’s intentions or feelings, if you get lost in what it was or what it could have been, it is very probable that you could drown. In the times when fog falls over your mind, nothing is clear anymore, everything gets mixed up and it can get as severe as losing your own direction in life.

I remember sitting in the kitchen and him close to me kissing my neck. I remember me closing my eyes and then opening again and his eyes were still there, looking for something inside me. I remember the last time we looked at each other, without me really knowing it will be the very last time.

And I remember me closing my eyes and then opening them again and realising that he is gone and I could be alone and deserted or I could do something for myself. I could try to understand love is a feeling, not a person and that if the person who impersonated love departed, there is nothing I can do about that. Expect maybe for making myself a promise that I will keep believing in love of all kinds.

An artist without the promise of love is deserted. I know that feeling of despair and acute loneliness so well and I will do my best not to reach it again, even if it implies solving a delicate equation of emotional equilibrium. I am a dreamer and sometimes I think that people like me, for whom reality is the devil, belong to the theatre, they could go there every evening, take a sit in a velvet chair, take off their hat and the disguise that is so necessary in order to function well in society and somebody shows up and feeds us drama and dreams, permanence and passionate love. Call us dreamers or dancers on the rope at unknown heights in the sky, or sunk in the underworld, when the skies are covered by dark stormy clouds. Call us dreamers when we will slip on ice because we touch reality quite rarely, call us dreamers when we look you in the eye and tell you something, although we are never really quite there, you never know where we are, where we got lost or where we escaped because we always look for secret doors to take a quiet exit or a glorious departure. I wonder how many dreamers are out there in the world and how different their dreams are and if they ever meet to analyze the dreams of each other. And how many dreamers killed each other for their brightest skies.

There are places inside mind which I decided to not visit anymore. They say every time you think about something, you recreate the memory and together with it, you recreate the pain. I want to create and creation is about novelty. I was always particularly good at not thinking about something when I want to, I was always quick to shut down my ears to evidence and escape into imagination. But on the other hand, there are places in my mind I visited too many times. I was stubborn about this because an artist without love is a deserted artist. But only after visiting that desert, all our experiences gain meaning. There are oasis we encounter in life and there is the sea at the end of the desert. Think about each person you loved as an oasis and love itself as the sea. And think about life as the wavy surface of the earth, the mountains, the green lands, the rivers. Artists are those people who manage to come back from the desert with a message.