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“Have you ever missed a person even while they’re still next to you? Like you’re waiting for their absence someday, so you try desperately to hang on to the moment, so much so that you can barely exist in the present with them?”
“Close your heart,” she murmured, “and no one can tell you you’re worthless.” He looked away, his gaze distant, lost in his own thoughts. “You’re not,” he said to the window. “You must know that.” “I do,” she answered. “But … sometimes, late at night, the voice in my head tells me otherwise.”
“Winter,” she murmured hoarsely, swallowing, terrified. “Winter, I don’t understand how you can live with an open heart. Everyone hurts you. Why don’t you protect yourself better? Put up walls?” “What if protecting yourself kills you in the end?” he said. “What if the thing your heart needs most is right on the other side of that wall? I know it’s dangerous to expose yourself to everything the world wants to throw at it, to everyone who wants to take something for themselves. But I still leave it open, just in case something beautiful comes in.”
How strange an emotion love was, how powerful it must be to fuel kindness and hatred and empathy and revenge and grief, all at once.
Grief is love. It’s the price we pay for the gift of someone meaningful in our lives.
Imperfect. But we all did the best we could.
Sometimes you didn’t have to let people back into your life, to absorb all the cruelty of the world. Sometimes you didn’t have to open your heart. Sometimes it was okay to just let them go.
But perhaps there was beauty in not knowing. Maybe that was its own form of love, the faith of coming together even when you couldn’t see the path in front of you, when you had no idea whether joy or heartbreak would await you further down the road of life, when you had nothing but a guiding light in the distance to yearn for. Maybe love was not knowing and going ahead anyway.
