Loss isn't about losing an object of affection. Loss is about losing the view of ourselves with the object that is no longer with us. It is everything that could have been different, a yearning for a life that is not now. When we lose we do not cry for our object of loss, we instead cry for who we have become and the choices made in this becoming. It is the painful re-writing of personal history, painful because we are now aware that our destiny no longer matches our fantasy.
When we possess objects and people, we put a part of ourselves into them. We cannot isolate these parts and view them as they are – the birth of these selves are a result of interaction with the object or person. These selves have their own life contained within them and with each loss, we have a micro-death. We know how we react to death, the possibility of not being. A weird imagination to have, unimagining oneself. A unit of time that has come to naught, a brief being and by all means sporadic.
Loss is normal. Loss is what we all are left with. Pleasure is to surf and feel the wind against our faces, loss is that endless jump from the cliff into the sea.
In our world there's little scope for expressing primitive thoughts. Violence has been relegated to fantastical role in popular culture, civility is the pretense of a working, conformist population. The way we eat and live are several imaginations away from our foraging, agrarian past. Our everyday actions are far removed from the jungles we've risen from, with very little that reminds us that we are nothing different than the other living beings that populate this planet.
Our replicating behavior however, has remained the same. Though the attitudes around sex have shape shifted far from their biological purpose, the act of creation still calls for the primal in-and-out between two people. To create a being out of nothingness, in the shape and form of oneself requires a deep sense self-love or the total ignorance of the all the inputs that make our outside world. This is the element of thoughtlessness that is embedded into the creation of new humans, we do not think of ourselves or the banality of our existence.
The procreation goes without comment, it is a desire we share with all living beings. As our languages become more sophisticated and our ways of expression complex, the ability to diffract our thoughts into the outside world take the shape of a thousand mirrors. To avoid this confusion of over quantification of thought, sex lies as the real communication tool to express the unexpressed, An act to take solace in a state of thoughtless deep passion for existing.
Do we ever know what it is to love? Love is one of those things that everyone has an opinion on but no-one can define. It is an abstraction we are made to believe, often confused with sex as we are product of one or both. Love is that sunny photograph embalmed in memory, always enshrining a fleeting moment of happiness to permanence.
Love seems to require a reflection outside ourselves, the ability to touch, feel and talk. To know that humans outside oneself can feel the same way as we do, come to the same conclusions or learn in seeing life through the same pair of eyes. But all this happens through the eyes of the singular lover, what appears to be shared is still an independent byproduct of one being. The haze of love confuses these connections, the independent overlaps the dependent, the effect overshadows the cause. Programmed to fetishize the imaginations of impossible love, we are caught in an oxytocin frenzy of emotion and legalese of commitment.
In moments of deep harmony where one is aware of their sense of loneliness, love manifests as an inverted mirage, a weekend bender on the finest grain alcohol. All languages, description, romance and actions are for the outside. The mind when alone does away with social conventions, seeing that it is after all an inconsequential being walking a negligible part of the universe. This realization is in a silence that no words can describe. In the vacuum of existence, love is that pale blue dot, improbable yet possible. Is this a source of hope or of claustrophobic detention? This meaning is lost to life.