We all start as Strangers

It's fascinating to consider how we reduce people who were once everything to nothing. How do we develop the ability to forget? How do we make people forget? What we've put in their place in the meanwhile. The flow of events After that, always tell you more than what the partnership accomplished—grief is a powerful motivator. But what does it mean when you cycle out to becoming a faster instructor than joy? Strangers once more? In that sense, you never truly cease knowing each other. Perhaps you have no choice but to imagine them as someone else. not the person who was familiar with your daily worries and appearance naked, and the things that made you cry, as well as how much you loved them Even if all that's left is a semblance of their memories, when our lives revolve around someone, they don't suddenly cease doing so. There are always a few stray pieces. The places you've been, the words you've spoken, and the songs you've listened to have left an impression on you. We all ultimately find ourselves in the checkout line, listening to one of those tunes, and realize that our lives have revolved around them once more. And it's possible that we never came to a halt. Do you ever forget your lovers' birthdays, or all of your first dates, intimate and otherwise? Do your anniversaries ever return to being regular days of the year? Is it possible that the things you did and the promises you made were ever truly neutralized? Do they become void now that you’re broken up or do you decidedly ignore them because there’s simply no other choice? The mind tells you to go on and forces your heart to follow suit, I guess. I want to believe that you either love someone, in some way, forever, or you never really loved them at all. That once two reactive chemicals cross, both are changed. That the wounds we leave in people are sometimes too raw to risk falling back into them. I don’t want to believe that we write each other off because we simply don’t matter anymore. I know love isn’t expendable. I wonder, and maybe hope, if we ever just force it to be out of necessity. Maybe it’s just that we’re all at the centers of our own little universes, and sometimes they overlap with other people, and that small bit of intersection leaves some part of it changed. The collision can wreck us, change us, shift us. Sometimes we merge into one, and other times we rescind because the comfort of losing what we thought we knew wins out. Either way, it’s inevitable that you expand. That you’re left knowing that much more about love and what it can do, and the pain that only a hole in your heart and space in your bed and emptiness in the next chair over can bring. Whether or not that hole will ever again include the person who made it that way…I don’t know. Whether or not anybody else can match the outline of someone who was so deeply impressed in you…I don’t know that, either. We all start as strangers. The choices we make in terms of love are usually ones that seem inevitable anyway. We find people irrationally compelling. We discover spirits composed of the same material as ours. We meet classmates, partners, neighbors, family friends, cousins, and sisters, and our lives become intertwined in ways that make it seem as if they could never have been distinct. This is also nice. But it isn't the convenience and accessibility that we seek. It's not what I'm writing about at the moment. After it's gone, it's not what we focus on. We're all waiting for another universe to collide with ours and change things that we can't change on our own. It's fascinating how we realise the storm has passed us by, but we now see the stars in a different light, and we don't know, and we can't choose, whose wreckage can do that for us. We all start as strangers, but we forget that we rarely choose who ends up a stranger, too.