He let go of my grip and walked away. I looked down at my hands and felt the remains of what seemed to be an eternity of trust, laughter, adventure and devotion lift from my fingertips and off into the world around me, carried further and further away by the gentle beat of the wind with each passing moment. Nearly a year of love, light, hardships and heartache stamped out in one tear, a simple “I have to go” and a reflexive “goodbye.”
I closed my eyes, breathed in and felt as if the ground beneath my feet was a thin layer of glass, suspended above an endless sky. The moment I opened my eyes, the tear from my cheek had rolled off my skin and hit the ground with a crash and a tiny little crack. In that instant, that modest break in the glass had ignited an expansive ripple of fissures across the fragile floor, sending shards into the infinite abyss below.
My walls came crumbling down; the ground beneath me had shattered. This looked like the end.
And, yes, it was. It was the end of something. But, “the end” of one thing is just the start of another beginning. How beautiful life can be even when the heaviest of rain falls.
At the start of this new beginning, a conversation with a close friend led to a realization that helped me refocus my life and electrified my excitement for the future. We found the clandestine center of love and unearthed an extraordinary secret.
A secret that can be summed up in a quick little parallel, comparing love to those little bits of film that make our wee hipster hearts beat a tiny bit faster: the film of a polaroid camera.
“Love is your careful placement of the little pieces of precious gold, mined from the film of your Polaroid camera, onto bits of paper to save and cherish, some for years to come and others for a lifetime.”
Sound cheesy? Maybe a bit over-poetic? Yes, both of those things are probably true. But, the deeper meaning that my friend and I found between the structure of those lines has drastically changed my life.
No matter how beautiful a love between two people is or may seem, at the end of the day it is all simply polaroids placed on the pages of a photo book, scattered across the ground and blown away by the wind, because without God, the book has no binding.
God (i.e. Infinity, Allah, Universal Being, Elohim, Alpha, Omega, whatever you choose to call Him -- I see them all to be one and the same), the realization that God is above all else, must come at the center of any worldly expression of love.
While the pictures are the pieces that add perspective and allow us to understand and see the meaning between the pages, the book would not be without the binding. Without the seams, the book is not a book. Without the stitching, it does not exist.
The understanding that your relationship with another human being is simply mirroring the love between you and a greater being, God. The realization that the unity between you and another person is simply to more tangibly understand the unspeakable, beautiful love between you and God. That is where the binding of any love must lie. When that is not understood, falsely centered love ends in flames.
While "the one," your “soul mate," or whatever you want to call it, will end in a fully bound book, meticulously stitching together the manila colored edges of the pages dotted with the pictures of your memories, it doesn't strip the other polaroids from their significance and beauty. That is why it is so hard to let go of those unrooted relationships, easily swept away by even the slightest breeze without the seam to hold them together. These pages are certainly not lacking in importance or meaning, but they have no core; they have no depth.
We only know that certain pages are not bound at the point in which they blow from our fingertips, so we continue investing and pouring our souls into crafting the perfect shot and pasting it perfectly into place, only to have the page swept from your fingertips seconds after dotting the last corner of that polaroid taken with you two smiling, holding hands, and marveling at the palette of a sunset.
We can’t hold the book until it’s finished, so we can’t really know which relationships will inspire until the end of our days. And, it’s so hard not knowing the whole time! I doubt we will ever really be able to understand this crazy little thing that we call love between one another. Though true love, we know, bound by and centered on the love of God allows us to more clearly see and understand His love: “To Love another person is to see the face of God." We never will truly know who lets us see through that gateway and look on to the face of God until the last page has turned and the book has been closed.
Who knows where the future may lead. Maybe the space and growth of time will stitch the pages of old Polaroids, or maybe a new book will be started, the stitching in place from the start of page one.
But, for now, I have decoded a little secret that has relit a flame in my soul. The layer of glass, stronger than ever, has reformed beneath my feet and supports my sprints as I now wander and look up to the wonders of the world around me. For, there is an infinite love, stemming from the opulence above, stitching together the pages of my own story.
I’ll close by letting you in on a little something special about this secret. This one, like many other secrets, is meant to be held inside, close to your heart. But, it’s not meant to be kept dormant and hidden from those around you, as so many secrets are. It is meant to be lived out from the deepest fibers of your being. I dare you to step out. Do not simply bind the pages of your romantic books, bind the pages of your life with this crazy, beautiful, infinite love, and let it guide every action you take. Share this little secret with every individual that you come into contact with. Let the truth and realities of this "secret" shine out through who you are, supported by the crazy, beautiful stitching in the binding of your soul.
