Love's keen and frightful sting

You are in a lot of pain and it shows - but, you know, I envy the way that you write and express yourself, you are s tep ahead heaps of people with broken hearts because they cannot do it like you do. Every sentence you write whether you mean it or not has something of poetry in it, it's very poignant.

I know you feel like you have to hide and I understand why you want to...and I know how painful it is when you know that if the person you loved told you he loved you again you would break out of your well constructed fortress and let him into your heart again. You will continue to love him for a very long time - it's very very hard to stop loving someone. There is no 'off' switch to it.

I can tell that you also have a good heart - you have passion and obviously this wouldnt hurt so much if you didnt. I wonder if the friend you loved maybe was put off by this? I am in a relationship with a sort of schizoid and everytime I show him affection just blocks it out and or is like a rock. He rarely notices all I do for him and it makes me feel so unnappreciated. If your friend showed a responsiveness to it at first and then died off it seems a bit off to me that he'd suddenly say he's straight...maybe was just in it for the sex all along and when he found out that you became serious he backed off? It takes a cold person to do that, especially after all you have been through with him. I'm so sorry for your pain.

Hang in there, cosmocoma. Keep writing. You have \talent, don't give up.

Gertrude, you are very kind. Not only for your compliments, but for bearing with my long-winded posts that read more like stories than anything else, and making me believe that it was worth my time to post them, and for others to read.

It's true, there is no 'off' switch to love. And even if there was, I'm not sure I would have the heart to switch it off. I would turn into a dummy of a person, with nothing to live for; I would turn cold. I believe myself to be cold now, but it's not because the switch has been found: I've blindfolded myself for my own protection, and I can still feel the warmth of the light above me, but I pretend it isn't there.

No, I don't think my friend is like that. He can be a bit restrained in the way he expresses his emotions, especially ones pertaining to love, and whether this is out of a fear of being sentimental or romantic, I don't know, but I know that the sparsity of his expressions of it, when he feels it in him to express it, makes what he says come out very powerful and warm and genuine, often without his realizing. And I don't think he's cold, either. I'm starting to see, and believe, that during our time together we both felt powerful things for each other. But what we didn't realize is that we were feeling them on different planes: I loved my friend while he was in love with me.

Being in love with someone is a feeling colored in a different shade than love, but they're from the same color that it's easy to think that they are the same. Being in love has a more passionate fire than love, and one that burns out far, far quicker. It's a near obsession with the person you are in love with: you think about them all the time, you feel happy to be around them, the sight of them does things to your stomach that makes you nervous and excited. You love the feelings they arouse in you and you want them to last, and here's where the honeyed words come; they want to wrap you in as comfortable and warm a blanket as they can, to ensure that you will always remain by their side. And I was so glad to know that he felt the same way; I didn't know that what he was saying was coming from a high that would soon fade.

Make no mistake that it isn't impossible to be in love with someone at the same time that you love them. It seems an odd concept, because the former can easily cast the illusion that it is the latter when it isn't, but I know that I feel them both because I know that I loved him quite a while before I was in love with him, and it wasn't a degradation by any means; if anything, it made my feelings more powerful. And they were, and continue to be, as powerful as they are conflicting: It pains me not to be able to show him affection, physical and emotional, as unrestrained as I did before, because he's now closed himself off to that, and it puts me in a state of almost overwhelming frustration to hold back what I feel he deserves. And if there's a part of it that is sexual (I'd be a liar to say that there isn't some element of the sexual in affection), I can tell that it comes from the part of me that is still to a degree in love, and pain comes when I know, after all he did with me, that he may never feel that way again; but the part of me that loves knows that if the boy was crippled, disfigured, or otherwise maimed (though heaven forbid that never happens), I would still do all in my power to be by his side, as I would my own brother.

I'll let Catherine Earnshaw speak for me more eloquently on these feelings:

I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of creation if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning; my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the Universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees — my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath — a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff — he's always, always in my mind — not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself — but as my own being.

These feelings that I carry with me can sometimes be so devastating that I entertain ideas of desperate measures I could take to be rid of them. I fancy that he sees me as a leech; and leeches let go in contact with flames. At times it can feel that the only way I can shake these feelings away, or lessen them significantly, is if I make him burn me away in his hate. Almost unconsciously I find that I act on this: I'm cold to him, and outspoken, unflinchingly honest and sometimes outright rude, so I could spark some spiteful reaction from him that would make me feel loathed and unwelcome. But carry this on too long and I feel a tremendous guilt; I care too much to see him hurt.

Sometimes, I feel that heart of mine needs trimming.

Wow, i love your writing. You are a poet.

I don't really have much to add as I've never been in love or dealt with heartbreak. Just keep struggling with it I say. It's beautiful.

Thanks, supasta. It's kind of you to say that, although I really can't tell you that I'm happy to struggle with it, even if it means creative surges. Some days I would literally give my legs away just to be rid of the pain, on top of the severe loneliness I've detailed in my other thread. Every day it's a struggle reminding myself why I keep living. I don't know how much of it I can take.