let forever be

in which i contemplate the idea of forever

barcelona horizon

What does forever mean? What does it mean to love someone forever? What even does love mean?

I contemplate these questions at 3am, I turn the phrases over in my head, I think long and hard about meaning and context. How can you promise forever to someone when you don’t know how long that is?

I used to sign my birthday cards to him with “forever” because it was a concept I believed in, that true love lasts until the end of time. But in order to believe that, I also had to believe in the concept of true love, which is something that now seems foreign to me, a made up thing that exists for people in fairy tales.

You stand on the shore of a beach and look at the horizon during a sunset and it seems to go on forever. But it doesn’t. It ends at some point, it’s just a point we can’t see. And so it goes with love. When you’re in deep, when you’re feeling sure and grounded in you relationship, you don’t see the end, so you assume it goes on forever.

It seems odd that there was a time when I thought our love was infallible, that nothing could divide us or tear us apart or rip us asunder, or whatever phrase you want to use. But as forever unwinds, so wake the demons who live within us all, and they wreak havoc upon our hearts and souls, rendering the idea of forever obsolete.

This doesn’t happen to everyone. For some couples, forever is just that. They live long, luxurious lives together, they never part, they die within weeks of each other because heartbreak is too much to bear. I am jealous of the people who get to know what forever truly means in regards to love. To never know the despair of cutting short the promise of forever, of love until the end of time, is to live in a world that seems unreachable to so many.

To promise someone forever is to promise something abstract. To whisper the words I will love you forever, to write in a card until the end of time, to vow to death do us part are exercises in believing the fantastical. You don’t know. You do not know what will happen in the future, what roadblocks will appear, what bombs will drop, what circumstances will cut short the trajectory of true love.

In a way, I always felt like I had to hold on tight to the ideas of true love and forever because to loosen my grip would be to let them go. In the back of my mind, I looked upon our love as fleeting, because nothing this good could last, not in my life. Every time he said forever, I would ask myself, what does that mean. How long is forever? I might as well have been asking myself how big space is. You can not know that answer. Forever is different for everyone, it can come to a crashing halt at any moment and leave you bewildered. It can last a lifetime. It’s all a matter of luck and good fortune.

I used to believe in these things: that loving someone is a lifelong commitment; that forever is something attainable; that the flames of true love never die. But I am testament to all that being lies I told myself. I did not know they were lies when I first entertained the thoughts, I truly believed. Yet here I am, left standing alone and I don’t know how to reconcile all those forevers with a hastily written the end tacked on to the bottom of our story. I still have a modicum of love him and there was a time even just a few months ago when I thought I always will. But I know that love will dissipate in time, when the years go by and I forget what he looks like, forget how his hand felt in mind, forget the way it felt to have him whisper I love you into my ear. All the little remnants of love will float away like the seeds of a dandelion, scattered in the wind, and I will be left with memories of what it was like to believe in forever.

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