Maybeee Sunday

 When you deeply love someone, it can happen that the pain of their leaving can actually be greater than the enjoyment you feel when they’re around.

If that pain not only persists but also grows stronger, you could start thinking that actually you’re better off when she is not around.

This discomfort increases all the more if it occurs to you, next, that all you were thinking about during the whole time when she was around was that in just one more  hour or two or three at most, she would leave, and there you would be, left with nothing but a fast-dissipating memory.

And that's not all.

The acuteness of this situation inflicts special pain because of your awareness that that loved person gives little if any thought to you in that much larger compartment of her life that exists without your being around, so great is the delight that she is taking meanwhile in a Preferable Other or Preferable Others. 

Yet that's still not all, because then there's the added knowledge of how that Preferred Other or those Preferred Others, who usually have not been acquainted with her for nearly as long and have not thought about her nearly as much as you have, nevertheless, because they have so much more leave to do so, they suddenly get to see your loved one not just for a few hours but throughout the day, and every day.  And a chill sets in which you realize that this means that in one day they will be favored by her presence more in a single day than you will in a whole year.  And they will do so while sharing in the most intimate relations possible, whereas you've always been restricted by forces over which you have no control to only a few hours at a time and then no more often than once every three weeks or a month of that person's presence, and then without personal contact of any sort, except verbally.

This is just one of many forms in which, besides being as beneficial and ecstatic as songs and stories endlessly would have it, and despite being impossible to avoid, love, genuine love, is nevertheless also often one of the cruelest forces that one can experience.

What, then, is the sense of it all?

After all this time, and after all the repetitions, and after the songs without end that are so tiresomely sung about it, the answer to that question has never reared revealed itself.  Not to me anyway.

I just know that it doesn't involve the so-called and fabled "Love of One's Life."  This situation doesn't arise just once, and it's not unique, and it's just as strong and acute on one occasion as it is on all the others.   Instead that chapter in one's experience can make its first appearance as far back as the utmost beginning limits of a child's memory, and periodically it can replay itself, not word for word of course but in its spirit in exact repetition, time after time, regardless of age and everything else as well.

       This is an interesting experience but one apparently never deemed to be worthy of jumping extreme, that is, of ever doing a damn thing about it, and instead it is a matter of just letting it keep coming on, over and over again, without amelioration of any kind.