Love Is Like Water, It's Meant To Flow
How True Love Expands You Into Something Better
Love is like water… It’s meant to flow.
Love returns us to unity, like water flowing back to it’s one source. Bodies are built for flowing and built for loving.
You kept saying it didn’t feel like real life. being with me. We agreed that it felt like some beautiful strange alternate reality. A moment in time, opened up eternally. When we were driving up that winding road back to the campsite where our friends waited for us bearing more beer and lighter fluid, the sky was so dark and the trees were so tall in their outlines above us. I remember you said something that struck me profound. The directions told us to keep going up the twisting hill for another 5 minutes and you said “We will forever be driving up this hill for five minutes.” It was silly and nonsensical and yet I loved it and repeated it.
We are still driving up that hill!
The magic we created with our loving is enough to build a life on and sustain it’s whole planetary system for eternity. That whole time with you was plunging into deep depths only to slide right off into the sweet lightness of laughter and every time you laughed I swear I could see sparkles like pixie dust floating all around you like a halo. When you guys were smoking yet another cigarette in the parking lot while Rachel and I were sitting watching both of you inhale the lovely poisonous delicacy, that couple came up to us, asking if we were famous. We must be a famous surf-rock band! She asked if she could snap a picture of us. We laughed at her convictions that we were the coolest people in the universe at that moment- and perhaps for that time, in that moment with all of us together and you close to me, it was true.
And I thought I had already liked you so much. I did! And somehow it only kept growing and growing and growing.
On top of the mountain where tears fell in the wake of the wind at sunset over the clouds, looking down to all the city lights. Hand-in-hand we spun staring at the constant certainty of each others faces as the background blurred into noting until we were dizzy with laughter and spins.
Tossing compliments at each other like snowballs. You tell me how I am wise and like mother nature, how I have a beautiful majestic face and other passionately slung words I cherished that made me blush and light up inside. Of course I too list all the ways I am obsessed with you.
We both said how much we missed each other and how we wished that last night we saw each other went differently. I laughed when you told me about all of the substances you were on and how you fell asleep that night in bushes with your friends after a surreal silly strange encounter with the drunk man from the concert who wanted desperately your friends cool red sweater. I was thinking of you that night, wondering why you didn’t come home to me, why you felt so far away.
When you walked up to me, I was staring at the pasture of horses with the music still ringing through my body. Up on the white picket fence, I was thinking about how horses should be free to roam and how melancholy it seemed to enclose them even in this beautiful pasture at this beautiful place. You put your head on the fence and said it was lovely to see me and I had only smiled back and nodded. You were so far, so far. And so close. And you asked if you should leave me alone but I didn’t want you to. It hurt me, I don’t know why. I thought it was done for good after that night. I didn’t know.
Our time is so magical perhaps because we know it is limited you told me. Perhaps indeed, I agreed with you.
It is like how when you are in touch with your mortality, you live life more fully. We were riding the high of our shared expiration and so we were burning on fire in love.
Me moving in, while you’re moving out. Across the country to the place where people speak in charming accents as they ask you if you want any beans on your toast and tell you that you are “brilliant darling!” Working on your films, smoking your cigarettes with all of the beautiful actresses and models fawning over you and your bouncy curls and perfect smile and the way your sweetness makes them feel special. Me, waking up to the sun and my tea and doing my yoga every morning. Laughing with friends in the same home where our story began initially. How could that be true?
I knew that it would be illogical and harder in the long run to see you and then have to let you go. But I also knew I had no other choice. Magnetized to you. It is worth every heart string tear and shatter, just those ephemeral magic fleeting moments with you.
I just didn’t know exactly how hard it would actually be.
We were really seeing each other until were no longer separate, but in that same place, watching ourselves as the one while we interacted as the two. That is what love is, to me at least. And not just romantic love, but any true and deep love. The Vedas talk about it too. Someone once summed up the entirety of the Vedas into this one potent simple sentence: The one became the two for the joy of becoming the one again.
The spark of recognition, the un-shrouded mirror of reflection that lives in you that lives in me that bounces like light fractals off of our light. Multiply, multiply.
That is what it felt like. Multiplicity. Stretching of the world into an expanded state of beauty and wonder and curiosity and softness and love.
When you showed up at my door just a few days later I was giddy like a child. And our connection quickly traveled further evolutions from there. I wanted to give you everything. Purely. You let me rub salt all over your body and paint your toenails even though you messed them up shortly after because you couldn’t sit still and stop from kissing me.
We plunged off sacred rocks naked into the freezing cold water. We wrapped our bodies around each other in the little pool we called a mermaid cove. And I’d realized how much I would miss you in these moments. Like a snail without it’s shell is how I could imagine being without you. Vulnerable and exposed. But ensured to grow and find my way, somehow through the intimacy of feeling the world.
I think it surprised us both, how much we loved each other. How quickly. How totally. Even if it was impermanent and only lasting for five minutes, forever.
It feels like floating to know and to accept and to be inspired by the aliveness of two humans together.
As you were getting ready to leave that night, I felt my stomach dropping into the abyss of grief and mourning. I thought I could prepare and that my preparations of reminding myself how much it would hurt would prevent it from actually hurting. But the only way through is indeed through. Feeling into the experience. Not running away. Not pretending it isn’t here. But being still through the shattering. We showered and you hugged me and the steam around your body and head made you look like the angel you are and it felt so surreal but so visceral at the same time, like a strange dream and I realized that soon this would all be nothing but a dream.
Because as much as it is right, as much as it is undeniable, as much as it is perfect, you said it yourself, it simply cannot be. At least not right now. Not when we both have dreams to catch on opposite sides of the world. The warm water was enveloping our warm bodies and with my face nuzzled into the shadows of your body, all I could do was cry. I tried to be silent and still so you wouldn’t see me. But you knew.
You decided to stay, just one more night. I just wanted to be near you and you would be by my side for one more night. I was too elated to be concerned about my pathetic-ness.
We cherished the time. We sipped beers and gave massages and told each other things we don’t tell. We peeled ourselves back to our hearts and even further back to our souls.
A definition I have come to place with ‘love’ is any connection that brings you closer to oneness. Or God. Anything that brings you simultaneously closer to earth and up towards the heavens. Aliveness aliveness aliveness. But not the kind that is excitement and expiring, burning out as quickly as it tore in. Rather, the kind that subtly touches everything in its wake with a still and calm song of creation.
Ram Dass said something once, about pure love and it’s heaviness as the most important thing in the world yet also how it takes an impersonal quality. He said real love is when you love someone so much but you would be okay if you never saw them again.
Now, I don’t think I am quite there yet. I would probably be devastated if I never saw him again.
However, there is a part of me, the truest part of me behind the me of my identity that knows the purity and the realness of our connection and what we shared that I am not threatened by “losing it” or losing him. What is real can never be lost nor found. It is only a presence that is certain. It is behind the “us” of our identities. Founded in something more real. It doesn’t challenge the beauty or the certainty of what we had. Even if I never see him again, I know in those moments, we shared love. Pulling from the universe’s perfect inspirations all around, we reconfigured the stars and the sea and the trees and the music and we made our own unique impression of love. A song. The energetic spores of love made their infusions onto our lives in that moment and tethered us together. We will always be driving up that hill for five minutes.
It is yoga in action. To sit with the discomfort and humanness of loss. To breathe into the intensity and alchemize it into something beautiful or at least evolutionary for the growth of these souls.
To feel this deeply is proof enough of love. When life takes on new colors and pigments and inspiration courses through your being, it is a profound expansion, a stretching of life and possibilities. And indeed, he and I were channels for that love for one another.
Regardless of what happens, we are not the only channels of love available to each other. Life is full of these channels and full of love entirely. I hope we both find many more, and I hope we can take case studies in our time apart and one day come back together and share all we have learned about the world and ourselves. I love him so much. Him. Not the him that is “him” but the him that is me too. And the him that is everything in the whole world. And the him that makes life alive. He has so many gifts to give the world and I can’t wait for the world to recieve them. It will make the world a more beautiful and inspired place. That is how much I love him. I couldn’t want to hide him away or keep him selfishly under a claim.
I love people this way, I just can’t help it.
I could keep all these things locked away in the confidence of my journal, my heart, the privacy of divulging these intimacies to my closest friends. But I would rather be truthful. The song of souls must be sung. And love is like water, it must flow. Love is a beautiful thing meant to be celebrated and nurtured and shared. Even if the time is fleeting, the love will always stay.
A devotion to loving. Though I also recognize that love must be created and discovered in this perpetually unfolding now. I can’t live there, in these memories as beautiful as they are. If I am there, I cannot be here. Where all the love is! Exactly where I am. Exactly where you are. It’s whispering in the trees. It’s murmuring in the waters. It’s bubbling inside of you.
Full body aliveness. Thank you for loving me. Thank you for receiving my love.
The most pure, potent kind of love is impersonal, without needing words, beyond attachment, unconditional, bringing you closer to the love that unites. Stay near people who have open hearts, open minds, who love deeply deeper deep and drag you out of the smallness of ego and separation and needing to grasp out of fear into the inspiration and potential of life. Stay near people who allow the tearing open of growth to be an exciting adventure into new realms, screaming with joy during the confusion of the fall into the unknown, rather than a terrifying agony into pain that requires padding and protection and the need to run and hide away away. Go closer. Into the doorways. Become one again.