The Gap That Love Fills

I’ve been thinking about it.  The gap that being in love fills.  The way it inflates every other emotion you feel.  

And what happens when it leaves.  When you have become used to it being around.  In one action, one conversation it can be gone.

If you have got used to being in love not being in your sphere of living for a while, you don’t seem to feel its absence as much as if you had been used to it being there.

That gap gets filled with other things.  The love of friends or family, or both.  The love of that film you can’t wait to see, that dinner party you are planning, that new album you can’t stop listening to, that evening in with a bottle of wine and some personal downtime, those shoes you bought the other day that you love so much you even want to wear them in bed.

But if you have got used to that feeling of being in love, and then it goes, it leaves a massive gap.  All the other loves have been compressed into a smaller space, to make way for this very important feeling of being in love.  So when it has been decided that this feeling really needs to pack its bags and find another home, it vacates its space and leaves behind it a total state of confusion.  All the other feelings try to move into that space, but they don’t quite fit.  They don’t use that space quite the way being in love did.  

When the phone rings it has a different tone.  When you wake up in the morning and roll over to snuggle back into the cocoon you have made for yourself, it doesn’t feel the same.  An evening to yourself feels lonely.  Your home feels too big.  Music doesn’t sound the same. There’s a side of you that isn’t seen anymore, the side that was reserved exclusively for being in love.  There’s a feeling of deathly quietness.

Then as the days pass by, it gets easier.  You begin to forget that being in love once lived there, in that space.  You start to appreciate those other loves are still around.  They start to appreciate that you have remembered that they have a place too.  

Gradually a balance is found.  There are evenings when you reflect.  You reflect on the way it used to be, and the way it has changed.  You decide that being in love is well and good but you must be careful next time it comes knocking on your door and asks to be let in.  You must thoroughly interview this feeling, ask it for references and a previous employment history.  You must make sure it will fit in with all the other loves and not try to take over.

But being in love knows what it has over other loves.  It is both emotional and physical.  It knows it can make your heart sing and your body race.  It has an intimacy that no other love has.  

I guess this is the reason it takes up so much space.

I guess this is the reason it leaves such a gap.