One gloomy night, four women met at a bar.
They poured wine into their glasses,
and raised random questions.

One woman asked:
“What do you think is the hardest thing in life?”

The first one said:
“Being paralyzed in a wheelchair.”
The second answered:
“Losing someone dear to you.”
And the woman who raised the question answered
that to suffer from a mental illness is the hardest.

Silence filled the space as the fourth woman took a sip from her wine.
With sorrow in her eyes, she succumbed and mumbled:
“When the man you love doesn’t love you.”

They didn’t understand that her calamity
was part of every answer they gave.
She was paralyzed in his love,
she lost herself in the process of loving him,
and she was delusional as she thought
that he loved her.

She is the meadow; he is the river.
His stream barely touches her roots
while she hopes to swim in his waters.
But, she can’t.
She watches others as they do,
while the wind blows her away.

He is the moon, she is the Earth.
He orbits her, casts his light on her.
She watches from afar, the astronauts landing on his surface,
while she’s on Earth
walking the streets that he lights.

In other words, he loves her not.
He’s as far as the moon,
as unattainable as a river.

She left that bar
battered and bruised,
as always.

She grew tired of seeing others swim in his waters,
while she scarcely had a taste of it.
She had enough of waiting for him from a distance,
when he can’t get any closer.

And after years of loving the man who doesn’t love her,
she realized her love was futile.
Love shouldn’t be an ordeal.
Rather, it should be bliss.
It shouldn’t compare to a far away moon,
nor to an inaccessible river.

Love, when experienced from one side,
is not love at all.
It is an illusion that only keeps the lover chained,
tormented,
and wrecked.

She left that bar and rethought her answer.
The hardest thing is
keeping yourself hooked on ambiguous emotions.
This hardest thing happens to be the easiest thing too,
as she had a choice.

She had the choice of no longer being a meadow
Nor being a moon-watcher.
She chose to stop loving the man
who doesn’t love her.

.

~

Author: Elyane Youssef

Image: Lauren Treece/Flickr 

Editor: Caitlin Oriel