Love Burns the Soul

3 minute read

Love creates immense suffering when it remains unfulfilled. It can effectively burn the soul, just as fire burns the skin.

The pain is so great that death appears easier than the soul's suffering, especially when you are conscious, because you experience it at another level.

You struggle with all your strength to withstand the suffering, but each day consumes more of you. Instead of healing, the wounds grow deeper.

This is especially true of kindred souls who may neither perceive nor be conscious of their bond. You cannot strike back. Your soul contains no hatred. You desire no revenge and do not wish to search for another soul when this one had been everything to your heart.

You can only renounce yourself and the world around you, because you do not want the person you love to suffer. If that person does not feel the same, if they do not feel the bond with you, then nothing more can be done for the future in this regard.

You know that one day you must disappear into the void, somewhere in the world, anywhere so long as you no longer exist in the place where you grew at love's breast.

The emptiness within resembles the absence of one half of yourself.

You wait, hoping destiny may offer another chance, although you feel that moment has been lost somewhere in the future, or in the past. The present offers only suffering and hope.

Sometimes the heart burns so fiercely that it becomes unbearable. The heat suffocates you. You try to breathe, but nothing obeys you any longer. Even thought goes mad.

How could a soul that had not discovered the Prayer of the Heart endure this? Perhaps it could not. In such moments, it might even choose suicide.

Renunciation appears to be the final salvation, not because you will escape, but because in this way you will subject your destiny to a total shock, trying to resuscitate the soul.

At least then, you will remain in shadow. Love will continue burning your soul, but this will no longer matter after you have destroyed every hope and drowned thought in the storm created by a change it cannot comprehend.

After me, the flood.

Perhaps this is a selfish act, but you did not choose what happened. You were forced to adapt, and, ironically, to choose precisely what would bury the soul.

Choose anything, provided it is not love, because love is not wanted, at least not at such a high level.

But if you refuse to compromise, the future becomes a blank sheet upon which you will write, in tears of suffering, the life given to you, whether you want it or not.

You do not think about a future life, because no one has returned to tell you that one might exist. Only here and now remain. At this moment, however, disappearing instantly seems the only solution.

Yes... loving is not easy, still less when you wish to fulfil what you feel. We are merely pawns in destiny's hand and, above all, in the mind of the person we love, for as long as thought remains master over the soul.

You are mortal. Do not therefore love something mortal. Love the divine. Love God. Love anything else that has nothing to do with the human being.

Otherwise, if what you experience remains unfulfilled, one day you will have to feel love burning your soul.

First published in Romanian on 24 July 2010. This English translation preserves the perspective of that period.

Original Romanian article: Iubirea arde sufletul.