How goodbyes in love are a recipe for heartache
Once upon a time...
As she looked out of the window watching the sky change colours on the unfamiliar city, streetlights lazily coming alive, there were so many noises within her that the stillness of the room was almost a relief. She waited for him, the man she had never met but felt a bond with for reasons that were beyond her jaded views on relationships, and that odd little thing called love. They had known each other for only a few weeks. Through the letters they wrote to one another, the transatlantic phone calls that were about nothing and everything, the stories they shared. They bonded over things that separated them, they shared things with one another they were scared of even feeling, they got to know one another so deeply it was as if they shared the same address.
The door opened, he entered the room. She turned to look at him, the face she loved without having ever seen it. They moved towards one another, wordlessly, their bodies joining in an embrace that felt like the most natural thing in the world, as the noise within her faded into erratic heartbeats in that semi-darkened room, in a land far away from home. In those few seconds, a minute, perhaps a lifetime, something shifted inside her.
Love. It was more than love. She was to discover that in the most unexpected of ways, in the happiness that was alien, in the pain that cut like a serrated knife, in the waiting that reshaped her very being. She loved him because not loving him was never an option. He loved her because he was meant to love her. Charting their own rules, they existed in a world where their laughter weaved dreams, their words meandered over the roadblocks, their rationality gently embracing their euphoria, as the harshness of the reality of their lives lashed against their universe. They loved, their tomorrows unknown, their fear very real.
How to love, when to love, who to love, how much to love, when to stop. Two people in love don't decide that. Their circumstances do. Love that is real lives beyond those circumstances. Rarely.
Once upon a time...
There was a woman who fell in love with a handsome stranger, who looked at her as if she was the prologue and epilogue of all the books he was meant to write. She was a married woman living with a husband who loved her without seeing her. He was a novelist who fell in love with her as if she was the only woman in the world. Their chemistry overwhelmed their diurnal concerns, their bodies entwined in a passion that didn't care about the military planes bombing buildings all over the city, and her busy life with her husband who had a ministry to run and a wife he valued as an asset. When her lover bemoans her absence, her life with her husband, she says: "We inhabit the same house, that's all. I'm the shadow he walks around."
They met knowing there was an expiration date, that their love wasn't enough to surmount the truth of their lives without one another. She loved him knowing she had to leave him, that day, some day. He loved her singed with the pain of watching her leave each time they met. They knew the pain of being without one another was worse than the pain of parting whenever they met. Their pain quantified their love.
One day, a bomb ripped through the house where they spent hours in one another's arms, flinging his body down the banister. A few moments later she found his body, still, without life, lying broken on the basement stairs. Devastated, her efforts to resuscitate failed, and he remained without a sign of life. Without believing in God, that day she prayed to whoever would listen. "Let him live and I promise I'll never see him again." As she knelt, her face ashen with tears and soot, she prayed to a God she didn't believe existed for the man she couldn't imagine living without. When he walked back into the room, her face a mirror of her shock and pain, she left. The room. Him.
She said, quietly, "You think love ends when you don't see me?" He answered, hotly, "To be is to be perceived." "Love doesn't end just because we don't see each other." "Doesn't it?" "People go on loving God, don't they? All their lives. Without seeing him." "That's not my kind of love." "Maybe there's no other kind."
As he hated her for leaving him without an explanation, she went on loving him every day of the rest of her life. "I have never ever loved anyone as much as you.
I will never, ever be with another man. You may see me dead but I will never be with another man."
Two imperfect souls, one perfect union, wrong circumstances, a stack of odds that threatens to wreak havoc, the right time that never arrives, a stopwatch of reality that measures feelings and delineates the parameter, worldly titles that define their relationship. An affair. An unscrupulous diversion. The end of the affair. Their love quantified by a tag.
Love. It makes, it breaks, it changes, it remakes, it destroys. It lifts, it shakes the core, it recalibrates the soul, it strengthens and then breaks the heart. The happily-ever-after lasts shorter than the credits rolling at the end of Tangled, but while it lasts, it's a feeling like no other. The state of being in love is interconnected with selflessness, of loving another being with all of you, of feeling one despite all the differences, of reading his silences, of finishing her sentences, of completing his thoughts, of accepting the truth, of adjusting with the flaws, of shared laughter, of unbreakable trust, of needing without stifling, of happily inserting spaces in the togetherness, of rejoicing in the togetherness. Love is when her heart skips a beat seeing her beloved's face. Love is the heartache when she leaves. Love is when he can't make a list of all the reasons why he loves her but knows one thing: he feels her absence every day of his life. When she wasn't in life. When she left his life.
Once upon a time...
She was a princess, he was a struggling journalist, away from their countries, they met in Rome. She wanted a few hours of freedom from her royal duties, he was looking for a scoop to make money. Her smile enchanting, she was gorgeous, trusting, eager to see what life had to offer in its few-hour window. He was beautiful, and while searching for his story, he found her. She just wanted to be without any rules, and he, captivated by her exquisite artlessness, held her hand while she felt free. She joked, "At midnight, I'll turn into a pumpkin and drive away in my glass slipper," and he replied, aware of the limitations of his story, "And that will be the end of the fairytale." Their Roman Holiday.
Rome, magnificent, mesmerising in its timelessness, imbued their few hours of togetherness with its magic of eternity.
He held her tight, wordlessly, and she buried her head in his chest, scared to open her eyes. They kiss. There were no words of love. Their eyes locked, and time stood still. They just knew. In a few hours they found one another the way most people couldn't in a lifetime. They were meant to be. But only they knew that.
Before leaving him, as they say goodbye in the car, their pain darkens the silence of the night. Her parting words to her become the naked pain in his eyes: "I have to leave you now. I'm going to that corner there and turn. You stay in the car and drive away. Promise not to watch me go beyond the corner. Just drive away and leave me as I leave you." Her "I don't know how to say goodbye', his "Don't try" become an ode of separation: long, aching, raw, forever.
When she returned to her royal life, she was different: grown-up, solemn, in agony. Refusing to answer any question, her royal entourage didn't know what to say when she said: "Were I not completely aware of my duty to my family and to my country, I would not have come back tonight... or indeed ever again."
Next day, amidst people, they said goodbye with their eyes, wordlessly. She seemed to have turned to stone. He looked at her silently, heartbroken. As the beautiful man walked alone down the long lobby after seeing his gorgeous beloved for the last time, pretending they didn't know one another, his pain became the only real thing in the world. Etched on his face.
Goodbye. The emptiest sound, the saddest word ever created by some masochist. And it never stops reverberating. In its loop of eternity.