si grand, si menaçant
So grand, so menacing. The weight of love is the weight of loss.
there is an old belief that wisdom protects us from pain. that if we become perceptive enough, experienced enough, wounded enough, we will eventually learn how to love without risking devastation.
this poem argues the opposite.
it begins with an admission that most of us never say aloud. we know. we know relationships end. we know people die, drift away, betray us, or simply become strangers carrying familiar faces. before we ever fall in love, we understand that every beginning contains the possibility of an ending. every promise already carries the shape of a goodbye.
and still, we reach.
that contradiction is the heart of the poem. love is not a logical decision made after weighing probabilities. it is something older than reason. something instinctive. something that asks us to gamble everything despite already knowing the odds.
the speaker never pretends to be innocent. she has stood in the ruins before. she has watched homes become memories and forever become history. she has held grief in her own hands. yet experience has not made her incapable of loving. if anything, it has made the choice more remarkable. she reaches not because she believes she cannot be hurt, but because she knows she will be.
perhaps that is what it means to be human.
we spend our lives forming attachments to people we cannot keep forever. parents. lovers. children. friends. even the places that shape us eventually become places we leave behind. permanence has never been the promise. connection has.
the final question lingers because it has no satisfying answer. why do we keep doing this to ourselves? perhaps because the alternative is not safety but emptiness. a life without heartbreak is also a life without intimacy. to avoid every ending, we would first have to refuse every beginning.
the tragedy of love is that it ends.
the miracle is that, knowing this, we choose it anyway.
we know. god, we know. every time we look at someone and let them in, we are signing some silent contract with the universe. we say: i see the end. i see the breaking. i see the last fight, the quiet distance, the hollowed-out home, or worse, the death rattle, the funeral, the bed we have to keep sleeping in alone. we know. and yet, we go. like dumb animals drawn to water, like hands to fire, we go. every fucking time. because we have to. because there is something in us that demands another body, another voice, another touch, something in us that would rather risk ruin than sit in the silence of our own lonely breathing. and when it comes, the ruin when the door slams or the papers are signed, when the goodbye is spoken or left unsaid, when they are buried beneath the weight of the earth or just beneath the weight of someone else we break. we break like we didn’t see it coming. like we didn’t know the odds. like we weren’t the ones who placed the fucking bet in the first place. tell me why, if love is air, if love is blood, if love is the one thing we cannot live without tell me why it fucking kills us when it ends. why does every kiss given feel like another bullet loaded into the gun? why does every "i love you" whispered against skin sound so much like an echo of its own eulogy? why do we do this to ourselves? why did i do this to myself? again. again. i have stood in rooms that were once homes and felt them collapse in real-time. i have pressed my forehead to cold bathroom tile just trying to breathe through the shattering. i have held a ring that once meant forever and felt its weight turn to nothing. and still, i know that i will do it again. someday, some way, i will do it again. because this is what we are. we are creatures that touch and break. we are fools that know the cost and pay it anyway. we are born reaching, hands open, not thinking about the day they will come back empty. so tell me— if i already know how this story ends, why do i still fucking want it? and why, when it’s over, does it still hurt this much?