He fell in love with her so deeply his entire soul depended on that love to be at ease. She had to go back home, it was just a semester abroad. He still had a year before finishing his beloved Fine Art degree, but he couldn’t wait. Not that he distrusted his feelings to be true and powerful enough to survive the distance. He couldn’t wait because of the agony of not being able to predict whether she could wait.

       He dropped university and went after her in the North. For a couple of years, he had to work as a bartender so as to earn enough to sublet an apartment. After that, a long list of temporary jobs came, none of them even close to his art passion. But that love was strong. He lived that love, he ate, he drank, he breathed that love hour by hour, day by day, year by year.

         The intensity of the love turned him from just a cute South boy into a desirable grown man. His body changed. Not that his physics had changed, he had pretty much the same height and weight he had when he had met her years back. No, it was something different. That love was so incrusted in him that it made his body completely connect to his soul, giving him a whole other attitude, an entire new self.

           The feeling grew so fast and big it eventually came to its maximum and demanded her own space to be. She suffocated. She could let it enter her nostrils and become her breath, her body, her soul, herself. She chose not to. She was finally just where she wanted to be, having finished her Master’s and now working full-time on what she had always dreamed of doing. His love was too big to fit the space she was willing to give it.

          He perished. He couldn’t dissuade himself from that love, they were one. His reaction varied between the unbearable suffering of the loss and the complete emptiness it left behind. Friends in vain tried to help, but how could they help what they didn’t know? The only thing they knew was the result of the body blended with the unmeasurable love, how could they begin to understand that unknown form in front of them?

            Slowly, the alternate pain and emptiness state gave space to some kind of meditation. He forced himself to go through his memories. Little by little, he started to remember things from before they met. He remembered his school, he remembered his hometown and he finally remembered his old friends and family. They were his only hope to get together the pieces of his old self, the one who existed before he knew that transcendental love. No, he didn’t want to become that person again, he didn’t want to erase those last years from his mind. But he was too weak to go away alone just now and too hurt to stay amongst the broken pieces of his soul. He understood in order to get a new start he would have to go back to where he began.

       Struggling to get on his feet, he found a strange inner conscience and relied on it to move. He went through old boxes trying to find documents and directions and spotted a long forgotten letter from his mother the month he moved away. He took the envelope and looked at it very intently before opening. When he finally did it, he found a picture and a note inside. The photo was an image of him as a baby hand by hand with his mom and dad, not able to walk by himself yet. The note said simply: “Never renounce your happiness. You can always come back home. Love, Mom.”

Self