” To lay waste to a place that once held life”.

One can love, and still never get that love in life, the way we hope, or hoped, it would be. And that is what I sit with, now.

It isn’t longing, it is … finality. Understanding, deeply, that something was lost and nothing – not time nor understanding or even fate – can change the outcome of something that was always meant to end.

What hurts is the truth that the love never died. Also knowing I cannot be its container anymore. It must be held by someone else, and only he knows his right way to cradle that.

There is no villain here, in this tender space. And, no lack of love either. So that makes it much more impactful, to sit with a loss that was always meant to be this way, only wishing – no sense in wishing – it could have, “if only”, been… different.

The thing is, the anchoring point for me right now, is acknowledging and witnessing that it was never going to be different. How could it be?

He chose another life, and so did I.

I can never, and would never, minimize this love, or try to rename it with something far less charged. We, he and I, understood, understand. And yet. And – there – with that, enlies the core wounding.

Because love with nowhere to go – where does it go?

Well. Hopefully, it integrates, into who we are. Into a much broader story. Perhaps it means I tell my girls how to trust love, and what to do if it goes sideways, and tell my son, how to ensure he never hurts a woman this way because – exhibit A – “this is what that feels like for her” is an answer I am not short on examples for.

We … Integrate. And we become stronger for it. For the love, and for the loss of it, no matter how that came to be.

If I had to name one of the greatest human tragedies, it is not love lost, it is, love interrupted. Love that never got its full arc. Never came to completion. Love that just lives in flawed humans, with no place for it to go. I know from experience, something new doesn’t erase it, something different doesn’t change it, and even, choosing to leave it does not make it leave. We just have to pray, and fight like hell, to learn to hold it and hope it doesn’t infect everything we try to do, after.

I learned that lesson, of NOT integrating. Of NOT letting it be what it is, what it must be. I carried, for years, something unresolved and unspoken and undone, and it hurt me, and those I loved. I cannot do that again, and yet still find myself here, now, trying to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Sometimes, we love, and we lose.

Not as some simple trope, not some symbolic bumper sticker cliche, but real, true love, that ends, and then has nowhere to go but to dig its claws into our psyche, heart, mind, and soul, and – what, then?

Well. Hopefully. We learn to live with it, and let “it” make us better, today, and tomorrow.

Perhaps I am intentionally vague here. Because this might read from many variations; Either or, this or that, the message is the same:

We do not get to decide. Who we love. What ends. Only how we choose to begin again.

And I could, God knows – oh, He knows, I could be bitter. I could hold this. Well. Strongly. And scream, “how could you?” until my voice runs out. I could point and blame and illustrate every single fallacy in the other, where he denies the very things I see so clearly.

But. Why? Now. Why now?

When it is just, what it is.

And carrying pain, this weight, hurts me.

It hurts me, and how is he?

Wondering about that the rest of my life will just reinforce the bullshit I already contend with, that if I was just – enough – none of this would even be an issue.

That kind of backwards thinking, I refuse to do that anymore. 41 years is more than enough. To show me, ME, that I am good enough, worthy of real, true, faithful love. That I deserve to be understood even when it is hard, heard even when the words can be painful, and given grace when I falter. Absent that, what the hell am I grieving?

The quote I wrote at the start of this is the definition of “devastating”, and I think, sometimes, that word is exactly right. But as painful as these things can be, it is what happens after we acknowledge the pain that matters most. Funny thing is, as an INFP, and to make matters more complex, an Enneagram 4, I tend to want to make sense of impossible situations, and I am incredibly in-tuned with, and comfortable, in the troubled spots, the hard things, the difficult spaces.

So. I tend to want to, naturally, investigate the truthfulness of sorrow, pain, denial, regret, ignorance, avoidance – because here I not only see the times I lived there too, but maybe hearing it from others helps me help them.

I realized, I know now – it doesn’t work like that. Especially when most people, and apparently those I chose to love, are really comfortable with denial. Avoidance. And the like. So, it just makes me the odd one out, and an easy target for the label, “doesn’t let go”, when really, it isn’t that, most of the time, at all.

I want to help, because, because, I understand. Darkness, pain? We are best friends.

But most people avoid them.

… all to say. Something. I guess I am trying to say – something.

Loss hurts. Admitting defeat hurts. Accepting endings, even those we didn’t want, hurts.

But. What do we do, next?

My answer is simple…