Love is the only feeling that can change us. Even hatred begins with love. In fact, you can only hate someone if you loved them boundlessly!
I believe you can love a lot of people in life. I loved a few. I want to write about our partners, not family or children. We are talking about romantic love, filled with passion, desire, and the need to feel each other. Looking back over the years, I know that one love is not equal to the other. Men, who were my life partners, I had always loved for something: because they were there when I really needed them because they loved me for who I was because I had children with them because they gave me a sense of peace and security. The list goes on. Each of us loves for something different. It is wonderful that we meet people on our way who complete our lives, make us better, make us feel better about ourselves. It is an absolute blessing to have someone by our side, who brings a better tomorrow into our lives.
Based solely on my own experience, I would like to express my opinion on those who appear in our lives, change nothing about them, don’t help us pay our bills, raise our children, nor change our lives. Our lives change just because they coexist.
Someone like this shows up once in our lifetime. Because we don’t need anything from that person, nor do they need anything from us, we love them differently. We love them just for being there!
And this is the proverbial only love of life! Not so much the only one, yet entirely different. It’s the love we always return to: with the sentiment, after years, after husbands, lovers, and episodes... This one love is always fresh, timeless. It’s our benchmark of love.
Once I had such love. We could sit on a bench and talk for hours. When we went to the bar, we would leave together at 8 am, still insatiable with each other. We were thirsty for each other’s presence. He told me about life, I told him about my books. We listened to Ewa Demarczyk at 4 am on his fancy CD player in his cramped flat in a stately tenement house in the center of Warsaw. We had our own world on the map of the world. Nothing mattered when we were together, just us, present and focused 300% in that one moment. Naturally, when we returned to our completely different worlds, our love stopped for a moment, for a while, until we met again. So, we met often...
In retrospect, I find that it was HE who showed me that nothing is impossible... When he looked at me, I knew I was the most important person in the world. When he took my hand and kissed the inner part of it, nothing else mattered at that moment. He stared into my eyes above the candle illuminating the table of the local tavern and whispered, “The most important is that you are”.
What did I bring to his life? I am not sure. Analyzing our experiences, I think I showed him freedom in the most primal dimension, innocence, faith in miracles and love, love without obligation, without anything in return.
Sometimes I miss it, that sense of freedom in love.
If you are lucky, you have experienced such love: one that triggers emotions you had no idea existed. You touched this person and knew you would never forget that touch. Organic energy connecting two galaxies; the stars seemed so close. Time didn’t exist – the moment we lived defined life.
The moment ended a long time ago, but I’m grateful I could experience it. I still thank fate to this day for putting me among the lucky ones.
Years later, I don’t hesitate to write it to him... and I write, “The most important is that you were!”
