But Not You - On Love, Death, and the Doors We Walk Through

But not you. You took and tore my heart into two million starlight, dancing beams of righteous polarity. No… you landed, were and are (?) the shape of my heart. When you left the physical, you left many truths.

One: the true, lived existence of the perfect love story exists. I knew — I know — love, because of you.

Secondly: that the story, in this physical iteration, is complete. But how? Most endings, at least, I can justify with hell, it was horrible. And in the end, yes, it was brutal. We walked through the valley of death, and I mean that as literally as I do figuratively. We were in the valley, absolutely. But when we reached the precipice — the threshold where the veil is thin — even though we both had developed wings of a sort, even though we both had journeyed through the underworld to the impossible… we would be going separate ways.

Your wings: ethereal, starlit, invisible to the naked eye. Mine? Seemingly invisible too, but attached, at the very least, to a physical entity. My roots, my feet, are still lying in their cattle-driven rest, here, in this plane. But you, my dearest — you catapulted to infinity in the blink of an eye.

The Fear We Call Living

We who sit close to death inherently sit close to life. It’s the Western world’s obsession with what it perceives as non-death — life, being your best self, plastic surgery, endless improvements, and even ambition — masked in the fattening, dairy-filled cannoli wrapping of purpose, which for most who consume it, will be filled with hot air… with gas.

We mistake this, as a culture, for life. We call this pursuit living — a Manifest Destiny of the self. This isn’t life. This is fear of death. This is running from what we perceive as Skeleton Woman, or the Grim Reaper. This isn’t life, I repeat. It’s fear — encapsulated mistrust and mistruth — flowing through your veins as pseudo life on the boat of life. But make no mistake: it’s not life. It’s a play, a saga of disembodied half-truths.

Because the real truth is, as I see it, know it and experience it, is that there is no living and there is no dying without death, without these doors we walk-through that we happen to call life and death. They’re both doors to a house we pass through when Mama calls us home for supper or off our tablet to eat. What we eat and the directional quality of our movement is what changes.

The Doors We Walk Through

“Life & Death” by VL

When conditions are sufficient, we come out of hiding and pass through the door we call life. We eat and dine on human, 3-D, organic matter we call food. We sit at the table. We wear clothes.

When conditions, however, are no longer sufficient — either through illness, timing, or even the Great Unknown — we go into hiding. We leave through the back door that we’ve named death, and hang out in the backyard, invisible to most naked eyes. We dine on spiritual delights until conditions are right again. We move, breathe, live. We exist in the branches of trees, and in the leaves as they sway hello in the wind.

These are not mystical, would-be, fantastical musings or wishes. These are realities for those who learn to see this way, and look deeply into the nature and death of life — really, into the doors we walk through.

Big starlit hugs,

Lalita