Great Love

When I started writing this I was sat in a pub having escaped London, a city I care for, because I can't bear it at the moment - there is so much for me to deal with that I can't do it while home; home - for now anyway, for at least some while longer - surrounded by too many memories, too many unanswered questions.

The title of this piece is misleading; enough people are going to assume that I mean good sex or something like that, but what I actually mean is the great loves in a persons life. I started out believing that I would never experience love and that nobody could love me. I guess in some ways I may well have come full circle as I am struggling to break the resurgent hold of those beliefs once again.

I've never been any ace with girls so when opportunities did come along, when I was younger and more naive and unknowing of what to do or the feeling that was supposed to be, I used the 3 colossal words lightly because that's what I saw other people doing. Change means that now I don't think I'll be using those words until I am sure, maybe more sure than anyone ever can really be, and both likely and inevitably someone should probably remind me of the brokenness of extremes.

Then I grew up just enough to let go of that childishness, and in other parts of my life I found a peace, a calm. After a few false starts I met someone. Not anyone I planned to be with long term, but just an opportunity to take.

Now I'm older and I have seen that I have to feel for someone to really act in that way and nothing less is really enough for this person; I have experienced that. Now I am older but less peaceful with less calm. And that person who I loved, together with the great love we shared, is gone.

People will question my revering it as great, without the benefit of very much hindsight - and I know I don't have anything to compare it to, but I'm sure. I know because I thought more than once about marrying her. I know because I'd never before loved anybody unconditionally, or ever loved a person more for better or in worse; never sacrificed more of myself so the seemingly inevitable end has left me stitching small fragments of myself back together and I know I won't ever be the same.

Over two months later and the loss still feels almost as raw as when it first happened, I still think of her and when I saw a sign with the name of her home town wanted to take a picture, send it to her and wished she were here.

But the truth is she isn't here, and in the dark midnight hours and unto the harsh light of reality's piercing daybreak her last words to me that she is over me ring in my ears. I wonder how I was so easy to forget but maybe the darkness succeeded and I pushed away the one I cared about most becoming incarnate that which I fear.

Yet these words are for me, they have to be for me. I'm the one who still feels. But they are from me. I've learnt a few things about myself through this trial though too. I've learnt that I don't cheat on a person I love, and I've learnt that I will stay till the very end and I won't be the one to walk away.

I don't yet know if learning those lessons was worth it or not, but I'm beginning to realise something else too. I don't think you ever forget a great love. Everybody is different, unique, and someone you care about that much will never be replaced. Perhaps over time we are able to invest ourselves in something else through allowing ourselves to build new feeling - matched in every step with sheer force of choice and decisive will.

And while I've long since passed in naivety that once you met someone you loved it would be easy, despite knowing the work and having met her challenge and bearing no grudging fear, I don't think I can bare to believe a true love was too little. And it's that world I don't know if I can be born into and bloom.