Perhaps you ask too much of love. You want love to be your servant. Beloveds, you are love’s proponent. You are the messenger of God’s Love, and so you are to serve love.

In one way, love is the most important factor of life, and you have been disappointed in love because of all you bet on it. Your great romances didn’t come through. You see each love as past and each past love as having left you bereft. Love did not stay. A loved one did not stay. True love in this lifetime did not come true for you. Love seems to you to be for other people and not for you.

You see a mix-up here between love and need.

Of course, the giving of love is essential. The receiving of love has swept over you. Your beef is that love didn’t stay with you. My darlings, it is you who must keep your heart beating love regardless of the outside circumstances. Where did your love go, beloveds? What did your love amount to? You held it tight, and yet the love you wanted did not stay. Another trial took its place and also fled the scene as if love could not be faithful to you. There is no going back. There is no finding past love any more. You don’t even know where your past loves are and why you were not given a lasting love. You never knew it would be this way, that love would beat you up.

You don’t know how to replace the love you seemingly lost. It does not give you great comfort, not even small comfort, to hear that love is not wasted, and that it still exists somewhere, only not with you. Past love is just that. It is in the past. It took you a while, yet you can accept this now. Were your big loves always nothing at all? Was your pittance of love always illusion?

If life on Earth is illusion, this must mean that your few big loves never really were, that all your great loves were only clutching at straws, and the straws grew thin. Where has love gone when it never was, not truly, not truly more than an imagined trial by fire, perhaps a will-o’-the-wisp and not even great tragedy, even as you may have counted your loves as mighty at the time. It was only a little tragedy which makes it not tragedy at all but rather a minor incident in a life that blew up like a balloon and then popped.

You wonder when the time comes and you leave your body, and you spot these past loves walking by, will you notice them? Will they notice you? Will you really just embrace these few as yourself? Right this moment, you don’t love yourself that much either. You feel like a miscreant when you don’t really even know what that word means. You know you don’t like how you feel, and you are tired of it.

You wonder if you are someone who messes things up. Are you one of those people who sabotages yourself? Were you mistaken to demand a Great Love in Life? You wonder why you couldn’t settle for just a simple one. Did you always demand too much of life, you wonder, and you hang your head.

You don’t think everyone goes through the sadness you do, yet you are not sure.

You cannot call back those days that filled your heart and then left you bereft. You wonder why you had to be bereft. You know you couldn’t just have shrugged your shoulders, yet why couldn’t you? That’s what you do now. How come that which seemed so irrepressible to you once is nothing now? It must still be something because still you mourn. Where is the faded love in your heart now? I tell you that love is all, and you feel so keenly that love passed you by or you passed it by like ashes in an ashtray, nothing more than that, and you say: “The pain, God. The pain of absence. Woe is me.”