You'll Never Be Her.

'Awakening' (from the series A Love) by Max Klinger, 1887-1903

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You’ll never be her again.

You’ll never have that same sparkle in your eye.

You’ll never feel that same love in your heart, the kind that fills you when you’ve met the person you want to spend your life with, and they’re here next to you, holding you in their arms.

When your soulmate dies, and you have to carry on with the rest of your life, it does something irreversible to you.

We try to make this feel better by reminding ourselves that the love still exists, that it lives within us and them, wherever they are.

Which is true, I’ve discovered.

But the problem remains: how the fuck do you live with that much pain in your heart? That much dimmed sparkle because they, and who you were when they were alive, are gone.

I look at photos of us together and stare at myself thinking, I wish I could be her again.

I need to get back to her.

I look in the mirror obsessively, as if my hair will grow back in front of my very eyes, devastated that I cut off some kind of power, some kind of link to our past.

Every day I think: If I just keep going, I can find her again.

But the problem is that...

I can never be her again.

She wasn’t living with his death.

So I can never be her.

Ever again.

Which brings its own kind of gravitas to grief.

Although that makes sense, seeing as that’s the Latin root of the word.

And so now, I mourn them both.

I’m not sure who I am now, from the outside in and back again.

But I know I’ll never get to feel like her again.

Then I realised that isn’t the problem,

that I can never go back,

never return to someone I once was.

It’s not a problem at all.

It’s the price, of love.