Labyrinth of suffering

From Ascribbler💌

“All I want to know is if he still feels the same. If I’ve affected his sleep like he has mine.”

I find myself saying this to myself as I’m lying awake at 2 a.m. The weird thing is that last night I slept peacefully without even thinking of him. Coincidentally, my sudden independence from the capricious and brooding version of myself that I had been in for a few days surprised me to such an extent that I wrote my exact thoughts on the matter at that very moment.

Me from last night: “It’s really funny how I am actually ‘fine’ right now. I am not even convincing myself that I am. I believe I am fine. The memories aren’t making me cry. They aren’t making me feel like I am alone. On the contrary, there’s this weird warmth. I thought all these memories were capable of invoking just one feeling in me: cold, hollow pain. As if when he left, he decided he’d take a part of me with him. He really did. I’m thinking about the first time we ever actually talked, how we were strangers. How I hadn’t even noticed him before that. And then out of nowhere, he was my person. Normally, the use of the past-tense to address our relationship would make me sad. Right now, however, I feel bittersweet. Happy because I got to experience something I know I’ll never find again; sad because, unfortunately, it didn’t, or more appropriately, couldn’t last. I am happy that I hauled myself out of bed today, that I tried, and that I showed up for myself. But most importantly, I’m glad that when I went for a walk in the park and I laid on the blanket that still smells a little like him, the one we played Spot It on, I heard him saying my name and teasing me about sweating too hard. I could see his smug smile when he won by two cards. This time, though, I didn’t fold the blanket, go home, and take a long shower. I sat there. I smiled through the memory and went back to listening to my audiobook on Looking for Alaska by John Green. The best way of ending this labyrinth of suffering is through it, right? By forgiving the answers that you failed to get, by forgiving time because it ran out too fast. Some things were left unsaid, some stayed unheard, and you made peace with that.

The peace of not enjoying the sadness and the brooding is when you stop mourning someone so fiercely and start choosing yourself again. I know, how can one enjoy sadness? But maybe the way out of feeling like this is victimizing yourself and being angry at them. And so I say, enjoying the brooding. It is better than accepting the loss of what once felt like home. Poof! Disappeared. You’re left to find a new home. Love changes from strong to weak. From weak to overwhelming. But not all love and loss has to be loud or spent crying in the dark. Sometimes it is quiet. It’s unnerving how peaceful it can be sometimes. That doesn’t mean you didn’t love enough; it just means that this one time you didn’t think about them when you sat on the grass with the same blanket that you two played cards on. This time you decided to let it be. I didn’t blame myself or him tonight. I didn’t ask myself why I tried at all. I thought of him and kept going. I mean, I’m not trying to brag or anything, but that is a pretty big deal. I am finally okay with being alone and not scared of feeling lonely.”

So much for not feeling lonely… We’re back to square one. You hear me? I’m talking to you, Last Night Me!

Isn’t it funny how much I contradicted myself in the span of just two nights? I don’t know whether to be concerned or laugh at myself. Last night, I was all about acknowledging the grief and choosing peace. Right now, I’m hoping to seek validation from something that has ended. Well, one thing I have learned is that grief is not linear. Like every other emotion, it isn’t a switch that you can just turn on or off. The problem is that grief is a burden and a blessing at the same time. At least to a person like me who feels too much. It’s always two extremes. I think this is part of losing someone. Without realizing their absence in your life, how much they meant to you, you would never truly be able to move on. Without understanding how much you mourn them, you would keep making the same mistakes, falling for people that you don’t really love. There’s a thin line between affection, curiosity, and obsessive idealism. Truly being drawn towards someone because of how they are, solely finding someone interesting, and liking the idea of someone that you’ve painted in your mind are three separate things. It is really easy to make mistakes and get hurt if you don’t understand the discrete characteristics of these three. But then again, if love was supposed to be something that required logic, I wouldn’t be grieving right now.

The grief part in relationships comes from a few things, and the more I think about it, the more my perspective changes. You mourn the loss of them. You mourn the version of yourself that existed when they were a part of your life. You start to miss how important they made you feel. Not necessarily in that order… Over time, the intense emotions ebb. The love you felt for them is still there, tucked away in a tiny box. But you start to miss the conversations, the moments, and how they treated you. A scent, someone’s words, chess, banana bread, baking, a song. Small things start reminding you of them, a conversation you had with them. The fact that you decided to make something out of that relationship means that there was love, not how you may have wanted there to be, and maybe love is a strong word, but the fact that it didn’t last means that maybe you haven’t found the love you are seeking. All of us, after all, are seeking a love that makes us feel whole. We meet new people, see what we like, what makes us feel ‘loved’, and we add that factor to our own definition of love. Subconsciously, we do. We start characterizing what we like and what we don’t. Boundaries, remember? Yeah, I have to keep reminding myself of that word from time to time. This trial-and-error keeps happening until two people meet with similar but compatible definitions. If it didn’t last, what is the point of thinking about it later and painting the yellow, warm, hazy memories in a blunt gray?

That’s what I try to explain to myself: a relationship built on expectations and external validations isn’t what quantifies your love for them. That is when you start loving the idea of them and how loved they make you feel. If someone asks you what you love about a person, and the only things that come to your mind are the things they do for you and how nice they made you feel, then you love how they love you. I try to remind myself to look at the other person in front of me and get to know them.

To be very honest, I don’t really know how to tell the difference between loving how someone loves you, loving the idea of someone, and wholly loving someone. You can’t really classify love, can you? Gosh, that was a lot of the “L-word.”

Loving how someone loves you would mean that you love that feeling of being needed in someone’s life. Loving the idea of someone is still thinking about them when you know there’s distance and time between you. Loving what could happen, but the reality is far from your fantasy of a perfect world. Still dwelling on how it could be or could’ve been. I am very familiar with this one.

And the last one, but certainly not the least: loving someone wholly. Now that one is a big mystery to me. What defines ‘wholly’? I think that the meaning of loving someone wholly is something every person has and or will experience. It’s like a secret every person cracks at a certain point of their life. I think I have loved wholly; I think I have been close at least. Considering my never-ending supply of emotions, I cannot say for sure if I have reached my limit of ‘wholly’. But I do see it every day. I see it in my mother’s eyes, I see it at the beach when I see an old couple sitting together on the cool sand, I saw it in Mau’s actions and her gifts before she passed, I heard it in Avery’s voice when it cracked as she was telling me that even though we’d be 3,000 miles apart in two days, she was just a phone call away.

I don’t really know if he loved me wholly. It is okay not to have answers to some things. Maybe the ambiguity of the situation is what makes it so special to you. I will never know if we could’ve lasted long-distance and maybe it is for the best. It is better to let go than to regret it after forcing something that shouldn’t have happened. I wouldn’t want to hate someone I once loved. That would scare me. If my emotions could be swayed that easily, then maybe they weren’t strong in the first place, and that would give me all the answers I would need about a relationship. I have seen what loving wholly means and that is what keeps me going. Knowing that even though I haven’t quite found it, it exists.

Maybe it’s a matter of who you put in the spotlight after you lose someone. Is it yourself or them? Who you miss more determines if you really knew them or if you just loved how much they knew you. No answer is a wrong answer. But the next time you dare to fall in love, you’ll know what you’re getting yourself into, even if it’s worth staying up at 2 a.m. to write a essay about something that even you don’t completely comprehend.

About the Author:

Writing under the pen name ascribbler, she creates a quiet space for the thoughts that arrive too late to be spoken and too deeply felt to be ignored. Through personal essays and reflections, she explores vulnerability, longing, fear, and the emotional experiences we often dismiss as clichés. Rather than offering easy answers, her writing lingers with the questions, finding comfort in the idea that our most personal feelings are often the ones we share. She writes to let go, to make sense of what is difficult to say aloud, and to remind readers that no one has to navigate the labyrinth of being human alone.

Substack ID: Ascribbler

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