I will always love you

I will have to split this article into two parts due to Twocents character limit. Make sure you play the song before reading Today, we'd talk about Grief; the love that outlived the body.There is a version of you that exists only in the mouths of the people who loved you. When they die, that version dies too.That is perhaps the cruelest part of grief that nobody warns you about. You don't just that you lose the person, you lose the self they kept. The you that existed in the warmth of their recognition; called by a nickname nobody else uses, laughing differently around them. The you that was still becoming, unfinished and safe enough to be soft.One day (sometimes suddenly) after a long, terrible waiting, they're gone. You stand there, holding the wreckage of every word you wish you'd said, every fight you wish you hadn't started, every I love you that sat in your chest like a seed that never found soil in time.That is grief. The exact, undecorated, merciless shape of it where every word you have ever known becomes suddenly embarrassingly insufficient. In here, language turns up with its pockets empty. But grief is never only about itself, it is love in a room where the door has been locked from the outside. It's love pressing its whole body against a surface it cannot move. It pools, rises and falls; sometimes softly, most times, wildly. Eventually, if you do not find a way to let it speak, it floods everything.<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/8964.jpg"/>Sufjan Stevens Shit Talk, a song so quietly devastating that it dismantles you in under five minutes shows us this. A song that is less of a breakup anthem and more of a portrait of love in its most human, brittle and brutally honest form. He sings it like a man standing in the rubble of something he helped burn down. Like someone who is grieving not just a person but a version of himself that only existed with that person. Towards the middle of that song, he says something so simple but weighs heavily on the heart:"No, I don't wanna fight at all." <h4>No, I Don't Wanna Fight At All</h4>Think about the last fight you had with someone you loved.Maybe it was over something so small you can barely reconstruct now. Was it the dishes in the sink, a tone of voice or a text that went unanswered for too long. Maybe it was big, the kind of fight that had years of unsaid things packed inside it like sediment, compressing under its own weight until it finally cracked open. Perhaps, you said something you didn't mean. Or, you said something you did mean (that's worse by the way).We fight the people we love because they are close enough to hurt us. It's as simple and as ugly as that. The people we love have the coordinates to our softest places and sometimes, out of fear, tiredness or the thousand unnamed frustrations of being alive, we use those coordinates carelessly. We fight because love makes us feel exposed. Exposure makes us defensive and defensiveness often looks like attack.Here is what nobody tells you about the fights:They end.Not always gracefully or with resolution. Not always with the closure that self-help books promise. They end in apologies, silence and the slow drift of two people back toward each other the way tide returns to shore even when it seems to have abandoned it entirely. They end because love is more patient than anger, even when it doesn't feel that way in the moment. Until one day, you run out of time to let them end.Then the fight, that stupid, small or enormous fight becomes the last thing. The last thing you said. The last tone you used. The last time you saw their face and chose distance over closeness. Then, you would give anything, anything! to unsay it. To undo the evening you spent in separate rooms. To answer the call you let ring out because you were still angry. To go back to the moment the fight began and whisper, in Sufjan's words:No. I don't wanna fight at all.Grief teaches you with brutal efficiency, that you never really wanted to fight. What you wanted was to be heard, held and known. The fight was just the broken language you used when the right words wouldn't come. Now they're gone, the fight is preserved in amber; fossilized, unresolved and irreversible. Sadly, you would spend the rest of your life apologizing into empty rooms if it meant they could hear you once more. It dissolves their justifications and leaves only the fact of them. <h4>Gilgamesh and the Mirror of the Self</h4>In the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest stories humanity has ever told, pressed into clay tablets thousands of years before the Bible. There is a king named Gilgamesh who loses his best friend and unravels completely. His friend's name is Enkidu. Their love for each other? Ancient and most tender ever recorded.Enkidu was made to humble Gilgamesh. He was sent by the gods to match him in wildness and strength. They fought when they first met. As the two forces of nature collided, the fight became love. An ancient primal recognition was sparked during the collision. Gilgamesh looked at Enkidu and saw, for the first time, something that could stand beside him without flinching. A mirror and a complement. The one person in the world vast enough to hold his company.Then Enkidu died.The dying was slow. Twelve days the tablets say (He became ill as a punishment from the gods for killing the Bull of Heaven and Humbaba). Gilgamesh sat beside the bed, watching, begging and arguing with a silence that would not argue back. When when the breathing finally stopped, the stillness arrived and the room became the specific, absolute, airless room that all bereaved people have been in. Gilgamesh did not move. He sat. He waited. He was waiting I think, with that wild and wordless animal hope that lives beneath reason in all of us. The hope that the person will correct the situation by opening their eyes. Maybe death is something you can negotiate with if you stay in the room long enough.He only understood it was truly over when he saw a maggot fall from the nostril of the face he loved. The body speaking in the only language grief cannot misread.Gilgamesh did not respond with dignity neither did he respond with the composure of kings. He wept. He let himself be ugly with sorrow in a way that power rarely permits. He is recorded as saying "Hear me, great ones of Uruk, I weep for Enkidu, my friend, / Bitterly moaning like a woman mourning / I weep for my brother, O Enkidu, my brother". A king, comparing his grief to the sound of a woman keening over her dead child as nothing less dramatic could contain what he was feeling.And then, in his grief, Gilgamesh did what humans have always done with the unbearable:He ran.He went searching for immortality not because he feared his own death but, he could not live in a world where Enkidu could die and he could not follow. Where love could be ended by the simple, indifferent fact of a body giving out. He searched the edges of the known world, crossed waters no man had crossed, all to find the secret of undying life not for glory but for the chance to never again experience what Enkidu's death had made of him. He did not find what he was looking for. Although, he found the plant of eternal life at the bottom of the sea and lost it to a serpent on the way home. He arrived back in Uruk with empty hands, the walls he had built and most particularly, the grief. The secret of immortality is that it doesn't exist. What exists is love and love ends, with the ending being exactly as large as the love was.Grief is just love with nowhere left to go. <h4>Alexander and Hephaestion</h4>Three thousand years after Gilgamesh, another king lost his closest person, the world watching him come apart at the seams.Alexander the Great (also known as Alexander of Macedon), conqueror of the known world; the man who wept because there were no more kingdoms to take, lost Hephaestion in 324 BC. What followed was the grief of a man who had just lost the person who knew him before the legend. Hephaestion had been with Alexander since childhood. Through every campaign, every impossible victory, every lonely altitude that power places a person at. He was the only one who did not see the general, the god-king, the divine son of Zeus that Alexander claimed to be. He saw Alexander. Just Alexander. The boy from Macedon who was brilliant, ruthless and desperately, humanly lonely at the top.When Hephaestion died of fever in Ecbatana, Alexander's response was operatic in its devastation. His initial reactions indicated he was in his violent hours of grief; he refused food and water for days, cut his hair in mourning which then, was an act of personal diminishment, the giving up of a piece of the self in acknowledgment that the self is now incomplete. He crucified the physician who had failed to save Hephaestion. He ordered that the sacred flame of the Persian temple at Ecbatana be extinguished (a rite reserved for the death of kings) because if Hephaestion was not a king, Alexander did not know what the word meant.He commissioned a funeral pyre said to be ten stories tall, decorated with eagles, lions, ships and tributes from across the conquered world. He petitioned the oracle at Siwa to have Hephaestion declared a god, so that worship could continue what presence had made possible. Perhaps, love could outlast death through the mechanism of religion. Godhood granted retroactively by a man who needed the loss to be survivable, who needed to believe that the person he loved had gone somewhere rather than simply, flatly, ceasing to exist.He died less than a year later, barely thirty-two. Whether from illness, drink, broken will to continue? Unarguably, we can propose that something in Alexander had gone out with Hephaestion. The man who had conquered everything had finally met something unconquerable and not to be survived. Grief, at this magnitude doesn't only hollow you out, it closes you. Sealing you around the wound and you carry it sealed and permanent until you stop. To continue, read the next publication

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