Coming and going.

I never wanted to live life like every part was an escape from the last part, but that’s how it started.

I am always moving out or in. I live the life of a transient. My mind flows in many directions and my body follows as well as it can. My heart is similar. It swells, strangely. It is always full and never satisfied. Always hungry. That is the nature of the heart, I suppose. It knows so well how to want in so many different ways. It has wanted often. It has wanted in varying degrees. It has wanted with wavering certainty. It has wanted weakly and it has wanted urgently. It has wanted fearfully and it has wanted fearlessly. This hungry heart has taken me to many places and it has lead me to many dead ends. To follow it leaves my throat dry at times. I do not know how it can be so simple to follow it one day and to abandon it the next. I tell myself I have never abandoned it. I tell myself I have only take a circuitous route.

Maybe that’s true. Who ever really knows?

How I end wherever I end up is a mystery. Because I wanted to go. That’s all I can say. I went because I wanted to. I went because I had to. I went because it can be so hard and so easy to go at once.

Sometimes, I went because of a woman. It is not easy to admit. We are supposed to be such independent creatures. We are supposed to be moved to action because of our own wills. Yes, that is true. But what is there that compels our will like the love of another? What inspires like the warmth of a beloved? Or the lack-thereof?

I started to take long walks after she left me. Meandering ones too early in the morning to see anyone other than the people who were too groggy to see me. I knew them well, though. They open their shops bleary-eyed, sometimes holding a cup of coffee. Yawning audibly as though the sound will help wake them up. Perhaps it does. They lean into their cars and start their engines as they stretch and warm up. Or they are the exceptions, walking swiftly, incredibly alert at five in the morning.

I’ll never understand morning people. Mornings are for warm beds and slow waking. Mornings were for me to rub the sleep from my eyes and press my nose against the warm skin of her shoulder. Mornings were for curling up around her, her body warmer than the dawn could ever be.

Then mornings were when I woke and smelled the chill of the air instead of her warm sleep. You know it is love when you want to inhale a person in the morning. When they have slept and sweated throughout the night and the resulting scent in the morning is thick with their pheromones. And when you think you could breathe them in forever, and you only think of love when they are there.

I came because of her. I know that. I can tell myself otherwise, but the truth is palpable.

I looked at her, and I wondered whether there were still a possibility. I looked at her and knew that she no longer looked at me the same way. I looked at her and I thought the world was an impossible place. I was not ready to leave it yet, but I could not be so near without madness gnawing at the edges of my mind.

And so I had to leave. I came because of her. And I left because of her. So the story goes. It is unpopular to do that these days. It is unpopular to do anything for the sake of love for another person, it seems. People still do it, but they disguise it with other reasons. They pretend it was not love that brought them to where they are, to what they’re doing.

But it’s always love. If it is not for love, it is not human. And we need to be human, beyond all things.