This is more like a lament, or a reflection… a very specific kind that stems from personal experience rather than a blueprint or canon that applies to every soul on the land, or humanity as a whole.
As you grow older and a little wiser, you realize that life, and nature itself, can become transactional. But the transaction I’m heading towards doesn’t revolve around the materialistic kind. It is closer to the tale of the oldest times, what you give is what you receive… the kind of transaction that stems from you, that can shape you and build you as a person.
To be loved, you have to love.
That love can be as simple as giving the same amount of love back, or you pay for it in some other ways… through presence, support, time, patience, sacrifice, whatever shape it takes.
The idea seems to be that you get as much as you give.
And who decides the equivalent, or the weight of it?
You.
And beyond you, the universe, nature, some higher power, or God, depending on your belief.
You make the call, within your best judgement, whether something is worth what you are willing to give away… and the world and heaven judge too.
And this transaction goes beyond just love. It touches almost every aspect of this worldly life.
But that’s not the focus of this writing.
Let’s stay on track, on the plane of love.
With that established, that you hold the freedom to give or take, including love… the love that you give away tends to stay away.
Not with you.
It stays with the place, person, or entity that you placed the love into. It binds itself there.
And yet, it is still yours.
It came from you.
So it is yours to take back, because it was yours to begin with.
Like in the case of heartbreak.
It aches deeply, and it can break you, but the love you gave them remains yours to take back.
And strangely, it is easy to take it back even though it is hard.
I know how contradictory that sounds.
But you hold the power, and eventually you want to take it back, so you do.
You take it back regardless of how long it takes for you to console yourself enough to place that love back onto you… to restore it to where it belonged before you chipped it away from yourself and gave it to somebody else.
Piece by piece.
You take the broken pieces of that love and try to fit them back into the original place they came from.
Sometimes imperfectly.
Sometimes after years.
But the place is still there.
And the love is still yours.
So eventually, it can return.
But what if the entity disappears?
What if the entity holding that love is gone?
And what if the love you gave them was something you never intended to take back… ever?
The place that holds your love is gone.
In the human sense…
dead.
Then what happens to you?
What is left of you?
What do you become?
You are left a living grief.
A constant, breathing, living grief.
Because part of you was willingly relocated into them.
And they died.
And you do not want that part returned, because your love for them did not end.
So you continue living without the part of yourself that you willingly gave away.
The very love that you chipped away from your own soul will never be returned… because you have no intention and no desire to take it back.
You still love them.
Death did not undo that.
So the hole remains.
The absence stays, and you learn to live around it.
You are forever left with a space that can never be filled.
A person walking around with these absences inside them.
That hole stays with you until the end of time.
And this happens every time your loved ones, those you willingly gave your love away to, die.
Every death is a new hole.
Another piece of you placed somewhere that no longer exists in this world.
Another absence you carry.
And so naturally, the more death you encounter, the hollower you become…
one person,
then another,
then another.
You keep living.
You laugh.
You eat.
You work.
You travel.
You meet people.
You love again.
And still, inside you, all those empty spaces remain.
Until, after enough years and enough deaths, you become more absence than presence.
More holes than what remains.
Hollower and hollower…
until one day you wonder whether there is anything left of you at all.
Whether a person can love so much, and lose so much, that eventually they become…
empty.
void.
love,
Azizul.