This is the cost of love



We view love as an emotional thing.  A feeling perhaps? A flux state?  But it's not.  Love is grief, and grief is love.  It devours, you are the prey.  No part of you left hidden when it visits. 

The day Ellery died, I remember staring at myself in the mirror and I couldn't recognize myself.  My face was swollen like I had been beaten.  My eyes were two slits from which tears someone managed to seep out.  My lips were dry and cracked.  My entire body, limb to limb, torn apart.  My stomach betrayed me, making me violently ill.  My head pounded.  I clutched it in my hands.  Willing the seconds, that felt like hours, weigh on me oppressively, while the truth pounded itself into my head behind my eyes.

YOUR DAUGHTER IS DEAD
YOUR DAUGHTER IS DEAD
YOUR DAUGHTER IS DEAD



I stood there, or laid there, or fell there.  The truth seeming to pound itself into every cell individually.  My shock registering one atom at a time.  Everything you knew till this moment has been shattered.  Your entire soul is ripped in half.  A being that came from your being, lungs that came from your lungs, a heart that came from your heart,

is gone. 



This is the cost of love.  Unconditional, pure love where you don't know where their breath ends and yours begins.  The love that entwines you so that the vines never truly unravel from your waist. 

The love that keeps you carrying the suitcase when it feels as if the weight of it might crush you.  Every day for the rest of your life, you wake up with the suitcase on your chest.  You carry it with you to work... to your family.  To your house and car and vacation.  The suitcase is at every sunrise and every sunset.  Sometimes it seems as if you have carried it your whole life.


This is the cost of love.