The Shadow of Love & Numbness.

I always thought falling into the void was something I’d become accustomed to, something that I identified with since I was a small child. Now, I’m realising that the void is something that scares me. It’s emptiness is vast and numbing. It’s nothing. It’s true loneliness without the light of inspiration, without love, without time, without myself. That’s the true darkness we’re all afraid of.

The darkness I’m addicted to is dark, but it’s still full of life and love. Grief, the shadow of love. Longing. Yearning. Missing them. The darkness of life is the depth I drown in. Yet the void of nothingness is my biggest fear. When I’ve given so much of my soul away that I’m left to reside within the consequences of it. The numbness, the grey liminality of the in between. The borderlands. For this represents death. Death is not exactly something I fear. In fact, the knowledge that one day I will die is oddly comforting. Like a quiet friend in the background of my cinema life whom I do not have to speak to. One that just observes me throughout my life, a comforting, distant, all knowing presence; one I know will always be there if I either choose or passively wait for the day they arrive. But that kind of death is also synonymous with love, because it is the end of material love, yet my love will transcend when my body ceases to exist and crumbles back into the earth. The void is the death of everything. It’s not that I’m afraid of my memory/‘legacy’ disappearing, I’m scared of getting lost within the abyss of nothingness. No passion, no muse, no sadness or even laughter, no music, no dancing, no friends or family, no love. Nothing. Just the absolute absence of it all.

So many of us believe what we want to feel is numbness. We chase a life of either hedonism or control, or even paradoxically, both simultaneously just to anaesthetise the pain away. We try to escape the ache within our souls like children running from monsters in the dark of the night. We claim that we just want to block the pain out, escape it by all means possible. Yet some of the most profound art of all time is a manifestation of our greatest pain. Our biggest losses, the death of what we once knew, the abuse we’ve endured at the hands of those we yearned to trust, the destruction of a beautiful, once in a lifetime love. If we truly became the numbed animals we believe we want to be, then is it not our humanity we’ve lost? Do we not become a walking void ourselves? I know that when I’ve become numb, when I fail to even let the grief consume me again and again because I have nothing left to hold onto, nothing left I can feel or give, I simply become a shell of myself. Everything is the disconnected grey. The absence of pain, the absence of love, a complete absence of everything: life itself. The death of our bodies is not the death we should be afraid of, for the void is the real death; the numbing of our souls.

Radioheads ‘True Love Waits’ makes me think of this…maybe because it is clear to me that love has never simply been the experience of happiness. With love always comes grief and loss, no matter how you come to lose it. For instance, even if you never separate from your love in this life, when they die, you ache, you bleed, you cry. You want to scream into the void for taking them away. You wish to fight, to blame someone or something for stealing them away from you. And really, the same goes for something that leaves before you got the chance to ever experience the fate of death with them by your side. ‘True Love Waits’ reminds me of this, because the melody and theme of devotion that runs throughout the song ultimately present us with the ultimate paradox of love; the integration of everything we experience in life. Pain, death, demise, happiness, peace, laughter, tears, desperation, fear, devotion, vulnerability, the walls, creation, our masks and the destruction of them.

True love ultimately transcends the void, and yet we always find ourselves lost within it when love leaves, even if just for a moment.

In the end, grief will always be the shadow of love. It hurts and makes us suffer, no matter how that love manifests…but at least it’s real. It’s end is gritty, but our fear of this pain is something we ultimately have to face.

The true terror is the numbness; the void where nothing, not even the pain, exists anymore. Thank you, Radiohead (especially Thom Yorke, of course) for such a stunning soundtrack, the one that helped me write on such profound thoughts and feelings. 🖤