Love, Like Water

What’s the use of returning to the story of a dead love? Not to find “what happened,” but why it matters. To find matter—that place where love and death kiss, that place of creation and destruction. To find the glimpses of art and heart in my own story, the small sediments that arrange and settle, then again rise and rearrange.

Coming out of numbness and back into feeling can be initially painful and jarring, like blood returning to a sleepy limb—but those pins and needles are a sign of life returning. The undamming of tears in your unfelt places are what Gibran calls “the pain of too much tenderness,” but this is a healing grief that restores fertility to your soil. {68}

as if he had drunk deeply of the water her father had loved, immersed himself in a necessary spring, while she was crumbling, stunned, undone by the same experience, hurrying back to her apartment, hiding her tears from passersby, bumping into poles and fences.

we come to see pain as made of love,