"The Opposite of Love"

Last night I finished the book called "The Opposite of Love." I thought it was going to be a breezy comedy about a twenty-something woman and her plight to find her way in the world. Instead, it was heavy...perhaps "heavy" isn't the right word, but it certainly struck a painful cord in my heart.

While I never quite bought the narrator's definition for what is the "opposite of love," some of her explanations forced me to understand some of my own compartmentalized sadness. In short, she explained that the reason we sometimes hold back our tears and muffle our pain in times of loss or heartbreak is because we fear that if we begin to cry, we will never stop. There is sometimes no cessation of the losses that we feel, so we are left knowing that no matter how many tears that our eyes leak, there will still be more. We cannot open the floodgates to a flood that we know will drown us.

I share this not to dwell on my own losses, for I am grateful and happy every moment, but to lend this explanation to others that might wonder if their dry eyes reveal a cold heart. No. It is merely a defense to defend against the fear that we might not recover. Then again, we don't. I suppose life is a series of scars and prayers and memories, and the beauty is that we don't ever recover.