Viscott wrote “To love and be loved is like feeling the sun from both sides” but perhaps the cruellest trick life plays is to make us love someone who can not love us back. Unrequited love is hopeless, making us feel lonely and out of control. It takes away any feelings of self worth and isolates us from friends and family. Why we voluntarily put ourselves through so much pain and unhappiness is difficult for others to understand. Love that is not returned can feel like an illness, dizzying highs and devastating lows, the feverish need to be noticed, obsessive thoughts, a life so totally focused the rest of the world just slips away. We gladly live in the moment, misinterpreting every smile drowning in each kind word, believing that they love us back is easy when caught in the eye of the emotional storm we have created.
In time like all storms it will pass leaving us dangerously unstable in a tidal wave of longing and emotion. The person who holds the key to any happiness we may ever have, will use it to open another door and walk through, not looking back and often unaware of the devastation they leave behind.
The longing for a love we cannot have is the one that lasts the longest and hurts the most. That part of your heart may be so badly wounded it may never completely heal, but you will learn to fold it up and put it away, there are many compartments in the heart and as you close this one up, another will open.
There will be weeping and there will be pain, even when there are no more tears and you have stopped the bleeding it may be a while before it is the end of heartbreak, but as the storm dies down, it will feel like the beginning of peace.
"The souls dark cottage, battered and decayed, lets in new light through chinks that time hath made". Edmund Waller
Title quote by Oscar Wilde