The person you have loved—or for whom you first truly believed in the word love, or learned to feel its existence—in short, the person for whom you learned to love genuinely: that very person does not love you back. ---To accept this is immensely difficult. Or that person has deceived you in the name of love, which is an agony unto itself. Or that person does not love you at all, but merely uses love's name to exploit you, endlessly serving their own interests. This is a thoroughly sordid experience. Or perhaps that person does love you, but you discover later that it was wrapped in lies or shadowed by some unethical act. Then a kind of bewilderment settles in, and the pain it leaves often remains unspoken. Or that person will never truly claim you as their own, but instead love you with cowardly cunning, concealing and scheming. Such a circumstance is more dreadful than outright betrayal. Or that person showed you for a few days what the bliss of love's paradise feels like, then suddenly abandoned you without reason and left. In that case, accepting such loneliness becomes terribly hard. Or that person also truly loves you. But fate would not—does not—let you become one. Then the heart wishes to surrender to life, and many do surrender, yet many others live on in hope. Some live exceedingly well even then. Sometimes this living well is one-sided, sometimes mutual. But this does not mean their love or yours was false. It is simply fate. It requires no other explanation. So much for one kind of sorrow. But sometimes there comes a different trial: that person habituates you to their love, and then begins the theatre of their absence; to them your presence or absence are equally irrelevant; even if you lay dead on some street corner, they perhaps would not turn back to look; they are someone you cannot mention to a soul, even when desperately needed; you cannot tell anyone you love them—this simplest of truths remains unutterable; to them your feelings hold no worth; you are merely a doll to be used, discarded at whim, picked up again to be played with; someone who would not hesitate a moment to render you a stranger before others, an object of scorn and irritation, or even guilty—without conscience; someone to whom you cannot make them understand that accepting or even imagining anyone but them is utterly impossible for you; someone devoid of the honesty to love you even minimally; someone not the least remorseful for their recent deeds; someone who never wished to understand you, but instead twisted matters so that you became the guilty one and they walked away; and so many other things besides... ---To accept the infinite loneliness of that person's absence is one thing, but to find yourself helpless, destitute, and forced to welcome another in their place—the sheer coercion of it, the death-agony of it, the utter helplessness—no words can convey. And if this happens again in your life, then you have not even the mercy of escape through death. Instead, you must live on, a breathing corpse, performing the mature farce of well-being and shouldering the solemn duty of keeping others well. Yet if, after all this, someone arrives like an angel and strangely restores you to life, then you will witness the greatness of the Creator.
And if some greater monster should come into your life to tear you to shreds and devour you, then in that case…no, let it be, I’ll say nothing more! For what would happen then—truly, I have neither the words nor the courage in my arsenal of understanding to speak of it!