Loves and Losses

I've had true love and new love. Bold love and old love. Used and maybe even abused love. I have love, find love, meet love, see love, fall in love every day. Someone special, a most unusually lovely person, and I recently talked about the capability of loving. This person has made me remember, how I once before loved. My first love. I was twentytwo.

I had to leave him after nine months of incredible love, but we remained best friends. In the truest sense of the words. We were soulmates, as it's called. We still had all the possible love in the world for each other. We spent a month together after the break-up, cried almost every day, in between other fun and friendly activities, it wasn't all tears, but it was hard for both of us to come to terms with the fact, that we should no longer be a couple. But we knew, we shouldn't. Four weeks of living together, just slowly accepting, and enjoying our new friendship and closeness. After that, he had to go home, and we wrote each other long letters, always long letters. He lived in Los Angeles, I in Copenhagen. We visited each other, but much of our contact was per letter. This was before the internet. Telephone was simply too expensive, back then it was like two dollars per minute at that distance, and we just didn't even try to call up, probably afraid, we couldn't hang up again. I remember one phone call just before he came to visit the last time. Apart from that, when we were apart, letters.

I had him very close in my life for another couple of years. I treasured him. He had never become less my person in this world, just because we went from lovers to friends. On the contrary. We had both found that one, that got us. When I was twentyfive, he died. I lost my best friend.

I wrote a poem about it. If you wonder why there are two friends in it, well, what are the odds, but it happened to me once before. When I was nineteen. Here's the poem:

Best Friends

My world changes when my best friend dies. The one who saw me and loved me the best way. When he is gone, no one in my world loves me that way. No one laughs when I do that thing with my mouth. Calls me on the right day to say nothing in particular. Gives me advice only when I ask. I sneak ashes out from the service and carry it in a little jar in a chain around my neck. I grab it sometimes. I learn that I need a new best friend. And then he sees the waterfalls I tell about and knows the colors I describe. I see my new friend’s beauty. Feel an embrace again. Another person in this world accepts me. Finds me good. When that friend dies too, my life changes again. I keep the pair of socks I never returned in a sacred place among passports and inherited wrist watches. I stop making friends. Stick more to myself. Don’t built too many habits that depend on other people to work. I do the dishes and I cry. I think it’s all the water that does it. Small surprised longings for my own death drop with my tears.

But actually, that was not, what I wanted to write. I wanted to quote my ex-boyfriend from one of his letters. At this point, he had just survived a very serious heartattack. He wrote on page 15;

'I have never been much for giving advise. In the absence of the comfort I'd rather be providing, it seems to be all I can offer. And here's my advise. Love. Yeah, that's it. Love someone, love something, love yourself. Whatever or however, find a way to experience love. Great love, or small love. The love of a flower or the love of a country, it doesn't matter. Be in love with life and all that it comprises. Love every minute of the day and then love them again for being gone. I offer this remedy to all woes as someone who had plenty of time to ponder the worth of his existence from a hospital bed. What came to my mind as worthwhile pieces of my existence? Great highs I've had? No. Great moments of acting on stage or in the movies? No. Great feats of physical prowess or endurance? No. Great luck in gambling? No. Moments of great love? Yes, yes, yes! This is what dwells at the center of our existence. It's what we all want and what everything else is a mere substitute for. Love. It awaits. All it takes is the flowering of our hearts; an opening, a giving. This, I think is what we had between us. Two total strangers with very different backgrounds and very dissimilar and separate lives coming together in a moment where we felt safe and right to give our hearts to one another completely.'

Oh yes. He was in my life, which made it forever after a better life. I remembered him and this letter now, because I talked to this someone recently about the capability of loving. Someone, who had lost too, and felt it damaged the capability of loving. If there's one thing in this life that I know deep down I'm capable of, then it's loving. I love love. I have so much love in me. And maybe I can handle more love than most people. Even if I sometimes could protect myself better, like I write in the poem about sticking to myself, I don't. I don't protect myself. I don't stick to myself. I don't want to. I want life and I want love, and the risks that come with those are nothing compared to the risk of missing out on those because of fear.

Should I stop loving because I lost him? Never. We taught each other a lot. I was the love of his life. He was the first love of my life. But hey, it's ten years ago, and somebody else will come along. Where our hearts can't help connecting like they do when souls mate and hearts fill with love. We all know how it is with these things, even if time and place are completely wrong, you don't doubt at all, that something in the core is precisely right. Certain things just feel right. Love feels right. I'm sure my heart will in this life, once again, connect with somebody elses, as it did when I was a kid at twentytwo.

Now I've quoted myself and my dead friend. But we're talking love here, so won't I have to quote the master? I think I do. Because I could not agree more with Don Juan Demarco, when he says;

There are only four questions of value in life, Don Octavio. What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for, and what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same: only love.