The End of Love
There in the measureless void of the deep was, at a time unknown to Earth, a lone soul that gazed upward into the heavens. This creature found himself greatly troubled, perplexed with an inquiry that he felt had no answer. The field in which he lay waved gently with the breeze. It cooled his hot skin only slightly as the heat of the day wore off, his mind still burning. The hours had passed slowly ever since the moment he had lost something that he could not replace nor reconcile with any faculty that existed in his nascent consciousness.
This man lay with only the skin of a baroka wrapped about him for clothing, a four-legged creature not unlike what you might understand to be a bison. He had raised and slaughtered it for his own purposes. But this night, death weighed heavily as a thought drifted into his consciousness that had not ever crossed his mind in such a manner as it did then as he gazed into a sea of stars. He had slain the animate bodies of a thousand beasts to satisfy his needs all without any great burden, but as the bricks of a thousand towers, this loss that came without warning, this death, crushed him. What did it mean? Surely it could not be the end of life, of love … could it?
It seemed to him there might have been a sense of purpose a few nights before when he was providing for her, assembling a dwelling for her, but now, amidst his racked and beleaguered soul, there was none—no purpose to continue forth from one day to the next. Could it be, he wondered as he lay there unmoving, an understanding of grief ever expanding within him while apathy began to emerge, that purpose was no thing other than an illusion? Being a simple creature, wholly unfamiliar with the concept of grief and illusoriness altogether, he could not escape the consequences of the reality he was facing and the fact that it might be true. His mind began to expand in a moment of iridescent transcendence as he became more and more intimately aware of the deepness of his own consciousness, sorrow driving this new reckoning.
In his tongue he, in a repugnant revile for the very laws of nature that had in the beginning shown him the greatest of love, cursed the stars and railed against the earth in unparalleled torment, not ceasing for days to wail and call upon the eternities in one moment with genuine pleading and then fowl expression of disgust and despair in the next.
Odd though it must have been since prior to this occurrence there existed no notion of any sort of divine being. Yet he pleaded with something now that might have been conjured up in his mind as having the quality of immutability, a quality that rests eternal and heeds the laments of the heartbroken. There must be, he wildly justified as his mind flew back and forth amid tormented troubles, some unalterable decree which lies somewhere out there in some corner of the universe possessing lines of script that somehow allowed love to come off conquering over the specters of death. He pleaded with something, for something he could not get back for himself—the life of his love. For she was gone. She was beyond the banks of the river that glossed near his home, she was past the valley which lay at the mouth of the great canyon dispersing the flow of the water, and she was past even the gorge at the other end of the plains that separated his land from his brethren; yet, she was just a few leaps to his right, laying gently in a clearing he had made for her, white stones encircling her tan body that lay on a bed of soft pink petals. She was there—he knew she was—but at the same time, though he could not understand, she somehow was not.
As the night sky blazed with stars seemingly brighter than he had ever recalled, his swollen, weary eyes scanned them relentlessly, his tears soaking into the veins of the blades of grass that tickled his cheeks. The blades, like an ocean driven by the wind, flowed this night as they had every night before in a rhythm of waving since the founding of his world itself. They did not wave hello this time as they had a number of years prior when the two of them first came upon the field, but rather, they waved goodbye. And yet, they seemed indifferent; they seemed to have no care one way or the other whether it was the blood of baroka that fell to the ground or the blood of a woman cherished by a man who now, at this time, wished to have the very mountains collapse upon himself. They did not care, nor did the mountains oblige him, neither did it seem that any being he knew to exist considered his anguish.
Straining to make sense of his loss after days of sleeplessness and of famine in his stomach, a thought struck him in a moment. It, to his surprise, was not the thought of dying, but rather it was of living. In a moment there was, if one could imagine a thing more refined than a neuron which fires through the brain, something beyond the infinitesimal—a decision, a conscious choice driven by a particle of soul so refined that it split even the fabric of the heavens he so deeply scrutinized. Two worlds became of this man’s agony, one where he chose hatred, and the other where he chose love. Should there be infinite possibilities, endless worlds, and counterpart realities, this man found and singled out one. And perhaps this decision will be reflected in a choice that even you and I will remember making for ourselves at some critical point in our existences when we are brought to the edge of grief and discover for ourselves a hidden world of endless opportunity.
Oft in his later years he reflected on the loss of his wife. He held in his heart a notion that no matter the deepness of emotion, pleasant or painful, that one could make choices independent of the feelings which flood through the mind and overshadow the heart. It was in this fact that he proclaimed the divinity of love, being itself the sole, guiding principle in spite of any external circumstances. He shared with all he met upon the plains of his world that it was love that gently guided him through his agony and through the imperfect but all so necessary life that we all lead in one way or another.
He spoke plainly that it is and has always been the empowering force, not only in those who can contemplate deeply, but also of the very strands of nature, independent of the influence of corporeal beings. Sanctioned in honest resolve for what he deemed as truth, and in the strange babblings of an alien tongue, he had been reported to have spoken certain words to many members of his own posterity. He did so even on his deathbed when he lay in that very same field many years after his first true loss. It was alleged by later historians that these are the words that he spoke:
“To the ends of the stars and to the ends of our selves there, interspersed among our bones, is a decree, one that no being can undo nor control with any power save its own, and that decree is love. Should there be one who embodies perfectly the wondrous attributes of it, this being would certainly have power over all things in heaven, in earth, and in the spaces in between, even a power that transcends death itself.”
And so it was that upon these words, whole societies later evolved into cities and then even into nations, dynasties, and empires. There were those who considered this man to be the first philosopher and even a seer. There were many of his own descendants who became the first star gazers and astrologers who mapped the heavens. These oftentimes attempted to secure their livelihoods by making their way into the profitable courts of the kings, all having a variation of those infallible words in their mouths.
Over the generations, however, decay of meaning spread. Divergent understandings of the words gave way to dispute. Many people even lost their lives in wars that raged for the purpose of honoring the true meaning of what this man once said. And in what might have been a blink of an eye to any celestial observer of this place, there became of this one man’s personal insights into the heart whole ideologies that grew ever more wild and divergent. With stars becoming the transcendent souls of dead kings and with eminent kings claiming divinity, love itself ultimately was becoming a byword which struck contempt in the minds of many.
To any mortal creature who would consider himself a historian of this place, there within the pages of his histories would be found whole chapters dedicated to the kings and countries that secured their place in the records by way of enforcing their views of the original words. All of these conflicting ideologies would be set forth as state religions categorized by meticulous systems of organization, all being reckoned by the motion of the heavens.
If one were to study the history of this place by means of reading the books written by their own most renowned historians, one would get a detailed outline of all of the absurdities that took place over the years, all of which being derived from the first man who cried to the heavens in search of peace, understanding, and principles that go beyond death itself. But wholly absent in these records would be the history of those who, year after year, generation after generation, quietly held true to the principles of love, for their goals were not to construe the words in any way other than what they truly meant. These took no thought of seizing power for themselves but only watched out for their neighbors, gave of their substance, lived meekly, and did all that they could to embody the essence of love.
Many more years went by, and the existence of this man shifted from reality to myth, and few there are who have any sort of knowledge of the first man who lost so greatly. But there are still those who, without knowing whether he was real or not, know that love is real and understand what it really means. Of a certainty there exists a power that derives from unadulterated love, and there to this day remains a people who go about their daily lives and who, though divided by color, by income, by political affiliation, by inclinations, and separated by religion, by countries’ borders, and by bias itself, remain faithful to the decree interspersed in their bones.
There are few histories that account for this group of people, but they are there, united under a single principle. For loss afflicts them all deeply. It is in these depths where hope arises, a feeling deriving from a universal source that any can observe who have waded longingly through its borders, and for them, loss is not the end of love.