When I lose love, because I have lost a relationship, I am colder for it. I may not have wanted the relationship, I may not have enjoyed the relationship, but still it is cold without the love of the relationship to cover me. Love is like a constant companion, someone can be shouting at me and inside I will say to myself “my sister loves me, even if you do not”. So I keep my love around me and in my mind to blanket me with the warmth of being wanted, forgiven and regarded.
Throughout my precarious youth I kept my mother’s love like a shield against all hardship. I could feel her love – it lived and breathed within me and I thought I must be safe with myself in order to regard her love. Her death was the coldest and meanest of all. Like the manic winter of Virginia (as I have been nowhere else with snow) the cold bit into me deeply.
And so I feel about love and relationships that love is necessary, but not sufficient to keep a relationship alive. I may have to give up love to leave a relationship and that is the hardest task of all. I know that I will be cold and I remember the cold of my mother’s passing and it makes me frightened. But I also know that some relationships will not survive the bitterness of the world.
There is much dodging and dancing to keep the warmth of love around me and this is not the way that I wish to experience it. I wish to have in my relationship, the kind of love that my mother provided me with: A warm blanket that stays with me no matter what: A love that I never have to leave and that I do not have to fear. If you have this love it is easy to forget the cold, but I tell you that you should not, because love is a very powerful gift. It is a gift that you can keep forever, even if it is only in your memory.
