my ghost

“Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.” – Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving.

I’m having this personal art gallery project at my home you see, I am filling my dull white wall behind my bed with posters of my most favourite art works and carte postals from every city or place I’ve been. I’ve got Paris to my left, the side of the heart for it will always be in my heart, got London as lovers have photos of each other hidden in books, in shelves, in their mind, I’ve got ballerinas and stars. Close to me, a yellow fantasy of Chagall’s love paintings. I love Chagall, I really do. If I had to describe love in poetic non-words on a canvas, I would have definitely chosen one of Chagall’s creations.  He must have been so deeply hurt by loosing his chosen one, and perhaps that is why his lovers are floating, flying away from each other, trying to stretch their hands and hold from each other. They listen to music playing goats and they hold flowers, they fly over Paris… They do not want to fall apart.

“My hands were too soft.. I had to find some special occupation, some kind of work that would not force me to turn away from the sky and the stars, that would allow me to discover the meaning of life.“

The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person—without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. – Osho aka Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

This is not a random game of words and meanings I am playing here. Lovers against the alone ones. I am missing my best “friend”, my soul mate, whoever that may be (again).

Soul mate…a person ideally suited to another as a close friend or romantic partner.

Helen Boswell once said: “Giving someone a piece of your soul is better than giving a piece of your heart. Because souls are eternal“.

Soul mates do not simply complete each other. No, that would be co-dependance. Soul mates live together, explore the world together and it feels so natural for they are both travellers on the same sky, the dive each other in deep seas of feelings and they both come up on the surface, they look at each other’s eyes and dive back in again. They have come to each other’s life not to change it, but to experience it on a different basis, beyond possession, patronisation or expectations.

Sometimes I think a soulmate is someone that will make you be the “most of you” that you can possibly be.  It does not matter if they live with you for a moment or for as long as eternity lasts, like that thing I read the other day on the pavement while walking along London Bridge “Maybe you didn’t stay long enough”. What matters is that they met each other, and that can never change. The circumstance were such that it would have been impossible for them not to meet.