Love and Weightlessness

This was originally posted in my Multiply blog last March 2007. I am re-posting this in memory of my relationship with the man who gave me the most significant gift in my life.

I have already disposed most of our memorabilia over the past few weeks. Though, of course, I decided to keep some for future purposes.

Anyway, before I start writing something else. Here is Love and Weightlessness, slightly reworked from its original text.

It is quite unthinkable for love and weightlessness to appear in one sentence without any purpose of defining their points of contrast. But tonight, I just realized the unthinkable – that love and weightlessness can, in fact, be put together within a person’s sense of being.

Love without passion, attachment and excitement is weightless.

I used to wonder why holding someone who has been a significant part of my past no longer elicited intense feelings in me. Was it because love has been gone on my part? If this was so, then holding him would have made my heart feel like a bottomless pit – void of any emotion or in other words, empty. But I did not feel any sense of emptiness then. There was, in fact, a certain sense of fullness. And what I felt was similar to the sensation of being unburdened and weightless.

Looking at him in the eye made me search myself and find within me some sort of affection that remains. I still loved him. And the feeling of weightlessness sprang from the fact that I have already let him go. I decided that to love him would mean letting him be who he is and not binding him with the compromises and restrictions that he had to make and live with within our damned relationship. And for me, parting ways with him will give him this freedom.

I realized that to have completely let him go entailed putting out the yearning to be physically and emotionally close to him. When I looked into his eye, I knew then that I still loved him. But I knew at the same time that I could only love him from a distance. I did not feel the need to express my love through talk and deed. It was a love that can be best executed without the range of a relationship.

So, therefore, weightless love is love in its purest form. It is the antithesis of mad love, which pulls us down. Weightless love is love without the burning passion, desire, attachment and excitement. It is the love that lets us be. It is the love that sets us free.