One of those days after you pushed me away for the last time and before you knew that time was the last, I watched a recording of Peter Rollins’s online seminar titled “Giving the Unwanted Gift of Nothing“.  The gift being love.

Typically for Dr. Rollins, it’s heavily philosophical and then it all makes wondrous sense.  (Speaking of the bell.)

He muses that if the thesis is  “love exists”, and the antithesis, “love doesn’t exist”, then the synthesis is “love brings things into existence”.  As in, when we interact with the world: objects, people, they are just objects in the world, not particularly distinct.  In contrast, when we behold a loved one, they are special, distinct, unique.  Our love makes them such.

Likewise…

Thesis: “love is sublime”; antithesis: “love is mundane”; synthesis: “love is that what renders something sublime”.

Thesis: “love is meaningful”; antithesis: “love is meaningless”; synthesis: “love is that what brings meaning into the world”.

You were special.  You were sublime.  You were interesting.  You were so, because I loved you.

Here I have a key to unmaking love.

It’s reverse engineering of sorts.  I will make you not special, banal, tedious.  As if you were an unremarkable stranger on the street, indistinguishable, for all practical purposes, from a piece of furniture.

I was sad for all those days when you didn’t know we were done, when I knew. I dreaded the imminent unraveling for a couple of months before that.  I dreaded, with less intensity, less imminent unravelling, pretty much all the time we were close, before that.  I hoped that maybe you would choose to love me, to see me as special, sublime, and all that.  Then I grieved for a couple of days after it was all over… and was done with it.  Done with you.

I don’t believe how happy I am!  There is that concept of “toxic relationship”.  I didn’t think I had experienced that apart from maybe at home growing up. Yet now I don’t believe how wonderful it is to no longer be in a constant state of anxiety, triggered by our relationship, peppered with a bit of neglect, a bit of rejection here and there.  It’s like I stopped drinking poison.  That was it, a toxic relationship.  Unbelievable!

There will probably be sadness now and then.   Mostly though, it’s unmade and unraveled.  You have lost meaning.  I feel happy and free, for the first time in a while.