To love is to Die

Camus once wrote that the very thing which gives one a reason to live can also become a reason to die. I'm paraphrasing here, but this is what it meant, in gist.

Initially, whenever I read this, I thought, "What does it mean?" I mean, how can something one loves be a cause of one's death? But now, as I come to realize it, I wish I had never read it in the first place. The settling of this thought is very disturbing — so disturbing that it is dead calm, and there is nothing more terrifying than a storm that goes silent within one.

We have all loved something once, very deeply — so deeply that we thought of it as our whole life. But there comes a day when it all vanishes, it all breaks, and never returns. Now the same dreams, the same memories, ache daily, and slowly the thing that kept you alive kills you the same way. You cannot die, as you did not live because of that thing. But neither living nor dying seems a rightful recourse from this.

The voice that woke you up in the morning still wakes you up. Only now you sit alone, waiting, and at times begging for it to pass.

The thing might not have been special in itself, but you made it so; even today, though it is no longer special, your pain still makes it so.

Ever looked out of the window, waiting for someone to light up your day? You still wait at the window, knowing the glass is grazing your skin away.

The smile that made your day will now kill it beautifully. You will still search for it, because you wish to die deeply.

But death won't come as love did. All that's left is you and your self-pity.

You once loved yourself for having found that thing; now you hate yourself for having found it.

One must never find something one loves so deeply that it can kill you — as it is not a good death, and it is not literal, and that's the worst part of it. Slowly you see yourself breaking, scattering into pieces here and there, but you cannot pick them up, because the place they were meant to be no longer exists. You can only watch as this dead silence slowly engulfs you and takes away your last hope.