Modern Romanticism

“We might tell ourselves that to do what must be done, for another, is a testament to our love for them. In that, we are compensating. For what? For potential loss, of ourselves, of our identity. We hurl ourselves into another to encompass them as we often embrace them, buried under entwined thoughts. In all this, we keep losing. When we love, or more to the point, when we perform actions for those we love, we become selfish when we risk their love for us on the hope that we’ll never lose them.”

Modern Romanticism

Humans love because we state that someone is precious to ourselves, to our entire being. It might be considered love when we forsake ourselves; although, it might be considered loss when we forgot who we are because we have bonded ourselves with someone else. Their identity became our identity. A life-bond, so to speak, because we soon feel as if nothing is more important than them. After that connection arises, we lose touch with our former selves. We question who we once were, as we state that our history was nothing more than a falsehood. Before we met them, who we once were was a bland nothingness. Nothing had color, before that person entered our life.

It might be in consideration of love, of honor, of loyalty. Or it might be in consideration of loss, of fear, of reality. A selfishness, in love, reveals itself when we act according to what we dread. We don’t want to lose, even though we lost ourselves. But that might be because our identity is no more, when it has become a part of someone else. If we love this much, we’ll act with selfishness involved because we are afraid of losing this other individual as we have melded our world into their world. Our world became their world, as it should be said.

What is the world versus our world? Our world, full of color. The world, nothing but a slate of monochrome, because we’ve blinded ourselves to what we’ve previously known. Should we lose that other person, we’ll revert back to that monochrome, attempting to paint color over emptiness and despair. But are they gone? They are not gone, for what else does grief exist for except for endless reminders of this fact? Grief exists in the back of our minds, gnawing and chewing at our daily lives – the one we thought was left behind.

We did everything we could to prevent that loss, and even in the time of clinging to this grief, we are still preventing further loss. The pain might be just as precious as that person, when they had existed in the flesh. In this selfishness, we exhibit a hunger for simple and pure hope. A hope, to want more of what we had, even though we can’t go back to what was. We can’t take a step back from that love we had to return to a former life, just as we can’t take a step back from loss to return our beloved to us.