This weeping that comes to you of loved ones long gone is a repeated refrain. The loss you feel. That which will never be filled again. There are places in your heart that hold treasures so sweet that your heart is bruised by the thought of the very sweetness. How you long for what you long for and can never have back. Yet somehow you rely on these memories of sweetness that bruise your heart. With words or not, you search for an illusory moment in time and space that now means all the world to you. It doesn’t matter how long it has been, you want it back now. Even for a few moments of then, you would hold back the dawn now. You would push back all the drapes for one peek at hands once held, hearts once spoken or not spoken, for what once was and is no more. You can’t find that past any longer except in tears, and you are not really sure what the tears are about. You cry for that which cannot appear in its illusory form again.
Yet you know that life is brief, your life and others. Your heart aches for the irretrievable. Yet it is your mind that has put you up to it. You think it’s your heart that is the purveyor of pain when it is your mind that sets you in that direction. Your mind pulls a fast one on you. It tells you that what once was belongs to still be. Your mind tells you that your past is a movie you must see again and again. You never want this movie to be over. And so your mind directs your heart to turn on that movie again and again. You suffer your mind and you suffer your tears. Your mind has pulled the wool over your heart. Your mind dances on to something else. Your mind twitters, and your heart is left holding the bag.
You had a treasure in the palm of your hand, and you want it back.
At the same time, I remind you that nothing is lost. Love is not lost. It has lost its form, that’s all. It may have been true love, or it may not have been. It was in your view, and then it was snatched away from you in what is called death or what is called ending, or what is called over. Someone moved out of a house. You long for the someone, and you long for the house, yet you know you have moved on. You don’t live there any longer either.
You cannot be the baby you once were nor can you be the young mother who once held her baby in her arms. Even if you both live together in the same house now, you are not the same, and the house is not the same. You mourn for that that was and is no more.
You ask yourself:
“How obtuse can I be to carry on like this? Am I the only one? I look around me, and everyone else seems okay. Do they bury the past only to resuscitate it the way I do? Will I ever let go of the past? Will I ever really free myself from it? What am I trying to do, trying to bring back that which is gone, and which God says, mysteriously, never was. How do I stop?
"I know I must no longer curl up with a story from the past, the far past. And, yet, how do I let it go, the thoughts that I carry that no one else will ever carry? What am I trying to carry on? If this is in honor of those who are no longer here, why do I try to lock them in time and space, even as I know that time and space do not exist?”