The Thing About Soulmates

It's weird but I think love is all about restraint. Anything excessive is much of a muchness. Too much of a too muchness. Be it emotion, expression of emotion, physicality - all this simply cheapens what could be beautiful. And then it dissipates and there is nothing left but contempt.

Begging the question: were you soulmates in the first place?

Isn't a lot for what passes as love and longing nothing more than a temporary addiction?

Or maybe, the fear of being alone? Settling for a warm body, any warm body to ward off the terror of loneliness?

And when the addiction passes, you're left with more emptiness.

I thought emptiness was absolute but it isn't.

There are gradations.

It's better when the love remains there, unexpressed, potent and ultimately, undefiled.

Especially when the one you love has gone away. And is never to return.

We live in a time of instant gratification, but what that has done is spoil everything, soil everything, cheapen everything.

The person you really love, you're going to keep on loving anyway. Not because you try to, not because you "work" on it, not because you cultivate the feelings, but because it's there, in your heart, like a piece of flint, like a scar, like something apart, but always present.

It's there whether you wake up and choose to feel the ache and the longing, or choose to ignore it.

It's always there because it's not something you can help.

Like the loss of a limb, you learn to live with it.

Focus on all the other utterly exciting parts of your life, lose yourself in distractions, tell yourself that it's OK, you're fine, you're really fine and you need no one.

But the thing about soulmates is that they linger on, when everything else is gone, when everybody else is gone, in the silent watches of the night, in the busy watches of the day, when you're juggling all the quotidian tasks of life.

They linger on inside you and the more quickly you come to terms with what you can't change, the better.

Love is not love which alters.

So it doesn't.

It doesn't.

It just doesn't.