You Never Unlove People

You never unlove people. You don’t wake up one morning and find you no longer love the person you once loved. It doesn’t happen when you give it a month. Or a year. Maybe not even in a lifetime. 

You will always love the people you once loved. Memories of them, all of them, will gather into what looks like a road trip you meticulously planned but never took. Something both familiar and alien. Those gathered memories will run parallel to your every day life. In some ways they will seem to grow, evolve, as if they were a living thing. In other ways they will seem cartoonishly stunted. But mostly they will seem to mock your real life with the unspent possibilities they always hold. 

You never unlove people and they never leave. No matter how far they travel. No matter how emphatically they rejected you. No matter how unthinking and cruel they were in the end. No matter how misguided the whole venture eventually came to seem. If they once came in, they never leave. You never unlove people. 

What happens is that you come to terms with the futility of wanting them. Or perhaps, the futility of wanting them exhausts you. One day you wake up and you know this: given another chance, I am too exhausted, too beat, to show up for the job. 

This isn’t a tale in which I tell you how to deal. I haven’t the faintest idea. Maybe you don’t deal. Maybe the cynics are right, after all; we are dying everyday. So those memories; ghosts of parts of you that are now dead, are dead cells off your soul. But unlike dead skin cells, there isn’t an ointment to oil them off you. There isn’t a set of rituals to implement and eventually check them off as resolved. Maybe you just find a place for them somewhere inside you. An urn, for all the loves gone futile. Maybe you curl the rest of the journey around them. I haven’t the faintest idea. All I know is that is that you never unlove people. You don’t. I don’t.