the distance between 'love' to 'lost love'...

There are times when we may feel that we can never distance ourselves from our lost loves, the once-love-of-our-lives. Hopelessly, we may feel that we will never stop lying awake for hours on end, wishing wistful wishes,... staring blankly at our phones, twirling them in our hands, waging wars in our minds, fighting the desire to call our lost loves. We might think that the day will never come when we stop hearing the lost love’s voice when we hear a song, or that we could possibly not look at a hill of daffodils and not think of his smile, his touch, his unending love…. We stand convinced that the day will never come when we stop thinking of the way sunlight highlights the irises of his eyes, making them glint green, orange and brown simultaneously… or the way those eyes, swimming with love, look adoringly and intimately, willing to forgive mistakes, to forgo misunderstandings…

We think such things… and then distance sets in, etching its footprints deeper and with certainty….. Soon enough, we realize that somehow we have indeed managed to distance ourselves. We realize that the hours between those moments when his eyes intrude our thoughts are longer and less painful than before… Eventually, distance has done what it excels at—it has dulled the pain, blurred the edges of the love that was, making it a relic, a memory… It has taken from us the sharpness of heartbreak and replaced it with the numbness of acceptance,… or perhaps of regret. Distance has wedged itself between the crevices of memory and willed the mind to replace, if not forget….. Consequently, our lives take up new plans, new emotions, and lost love dwindles to the bottom of our hearts, to the back of our minds, stored away gently, to be kept only as a fond relic.

What we are never prepared for, however, is the sudden upturning of those memories… of a sudden feeling -fleeting or otherwise- which assaults us, catches us unawares. When lost love suddenly resurfaces, and our minds are left in turmoil. Perhaps all that was needed to jog the senses in the end was just a song, or a word, or a concept,… or a hill of daffodils. Whatever triggers it, we find ourselves immersed in a spiral of memories, where even the way he always cocked his head to the side and smiled in pictures becomes a haunting recollection, at once too painful either to dwell on, or to try to forget…. We find ourselves unable to think of much else, as our minds become fully immersed in digging up old and forgotten feelings, emotions, desires….. It is at that point we realize that we can never fully escape lost loves….especially if we are the ones who let our loves become lost. Until distance again takes up its task of burying memories, all there is to be done is to simply watch the yellow daffodils swaying in the breeze and remember those eyes for what they were…and always will be.