I sit here sometimes wondering: who loves the hardest? Or better — are we, mankind, really capable of love at all?
I think about how effortlessly one person can hurt another. So nonchalantly. So unashamed of the wreckage they leave behind. And I ask myself: if we’re capable of real love, how is it also so easy to unlove someone, just as completely?
Or maybe that’s not quite it. Maybe the capacity was never missing — maybe it was just never pointed at me. Maybe he was fully capable of love, of protection, of never scolding or reprimanding someone — just not me. Maybe there’s something that happens between two people who create life together, some kind of bond that blends them in a way nothing else does, and that bond simply doesn’t extend past its original two.
I don’t have the answer. What I know is that I got the other side of it — the side where the tenderness had already been spent somewhere else, long before it ever reached me.
So maybe humankind does hold real love. Just not for everyone. Maybe there is always that one specific person love was reserved for — and the rest of us just have to learn whether we were ever meant to be that person, or whether we were only ever standing near someone else’s.