Necessarily Absent

It is said that, in a lifetime, we truly love three times. My first love belonged to adolescence, innocent, without calculation and without a full understanding of what was yet to come.

The second changed the course of my life. Something remained from it that would become essential and give my existence an entirely new meaning. There was love, but also helplessness, duality and things that could not continue without taking us further away from ourselves. Sometimes, an absence does not mean that love was untrue, but that separation became necessary for life to move forward.

I do not speak here about the third love. It does not belong to absence.

This work is not about the people who left, but about what remains within us after their leaving has changed us.