In Love or not in Love?
Other people and the effect they have on us.

The effect on people of another person’s presence can be profound. Yet we know so little about how we can suddenly be the centre of another persons world.
     I was thinking about what is it that makes us lower our defences to the point where someone enters and inhabits, re-arranges the furniture of our souls into combinations of sensational practicality, ones we have not sensed before and changes our humble earthly abode into a palace of physical and intellectual pleasure. We are the same person yet the combination of our experiences, thoughts, and memories are remodelled .Where I was dead, I am now alive, where I once existed I am now exultant. Yet I could not, we could not, put a label on what it is that has re-hydrated our dry souls to their fullness once more except possibly the mere close existence of the other.
   The shade of a smile, the turn of a shoulder, the lowering of an eyebrow and the jiggle of a buttock, then there is of course the considered closeness, the committed embrace, the turn that screws the body still closer when close has been exhausted and distance reduced to skin flakes.
    Love, closeness, defenceless commitment - arises from all of these things yet something else too. Acceptance of weakness and vulnerability, the ever open side door of betrayal that all empires of the divine have in their walls of individuality and when that door has been sighted the frisson of danger knowing that someone else has seen it too yet both remain steadfast in their refusals to participate in that great betrayal and as Oscar Wilde says refuse the opportunity to.. “kill with a kiss”..
     Then there is “loving better”. Something more than the first encounter and flush of a flowers perfume. When the heady intoxication of dizzy love passes and time allows the discovery of a rancid, lingering back tone that after the initial meeting with the bloom brings reflection and reassessment. How love grows into the depth of the beloveds presence, how trust fills out the unknown with abstractions and experience, how knowledge metamorphoses into secure projection and we surrender completely with question to their magical ways.
      If love is all of these things and the unknown factor of personality thrown together, then the undoing of love must be similar in it’s reversal - when the turn of a cheek and the lack of a kiss can reveal  the creeping desertification of an inner world; when the turn of a body and the infinitesimal shrug of a shoulder can be the signal of contempt for an entire lifetime of love and empathy, care and commitment. The evaporation of hope, a single cold turn, in a vast ocean of bed and the entity we know as love then dives to the great unknown depths of a silence we know is eternal. A living death not just for them but for their lover too. Falling out of love in some ways is even more interesting to the observer of human behaviour because there is so much to tell us of the opposite condition yet so little literature to inform us of it’s evaporation.
Surely there is the state when, despite all good intentions ,where once we were loved, our lover has turned in a trice into a cold distant and frustrating stranger and we have no idea why. We search our hearts, our memory we, drag a net through our souls to capture any gudgeon of justification for their state of mind, their confusing state of behaviour yet there is nothing we can hold up to be weighed against us. They have simply withdrawn their commitment like a peace force has just given up on a failed state. We are a failed person, a has been reduced to the limbo of a confused solitary self. In just a few days or weeks, or even hours we have been annulled to a shadow in their lives.
It is in this state that most lovers sorry ex-lovers find themselves no longer capable of thinking straight, when life’s future becomes untenable, when all they are as a construct of their own minds becomes dust and their  senseless betrayal overwhelms their will to continue in what they now see as senseless, hopeless existence. Oblivion calls. Loss of love' love more than any other  inner abstraction, more than any other factor is cited as being amongst , if not the single most factor we self destroy.
I know of many suicides, and of all the suicides I have more than a passing knowledge of , loss of love was in the forefront of that sad and lonely death,  yet all of us around that despairing human  had not one inkling as to the terrible inner catastrophe, the breadth of the disaster that had occurred within their inner landscape and just how devastated they really were by the withdrawal of this crazy  thing we call love.

And that is how as a nine year old I stumbled over or should I say under Paul as he hung lifeless from a tannin oak near to the tannery where I live. I didn't know what a lifeless body was until a stared at his , hanging still from the thickest of its branches.