Love is a losing game. As fragile and hurt Amy Winehouse sang this song, as much truth did she transport with it.
All too often a love story is less Hollywood and more opera. No happy endings and walking into the sunset on a beautiful beach but hearts broken, sometimes even lives destroyed. It’s La Traviata and Eugen Onegin, La Bohéme and Tosca. It’s about love unrequited, unfulfilled, betrayed. Meeting at the wrong place in the wrong moment. Chances lost and opportunities missed.
And at the same moment it’s so simple.
Talk is cheap. E-mails are cheap. Text messages are cheap. Tweets are cheaper.
Actions speak louder than words.
If someone wants to be with you, the person will be.
But how often don’t we listen to our sound minds reasoning with us? Instead we cling to a hope so frail and yet so hard to kill. We close our eyes to each and every sign, mistake any signal as good as we can. Tell our gut feeling that it must have gone insane and our instincts that we only have to will it and it will be. We never stop making excuses for why the one doesn’t say “I love you”. Instead we find arguments and explanations by the bucket.
And we don’t ask ourselves once how our right mind can be wrong this many times.
We bleed and bleed and bleed.
We hold on to what will never be. We try to let go a thousand times and never get away. We see clear, we know and still can’t walk away.
And when the distance between us and the other one finally comes in full view we see the hundreds of tiny blades in a line, but still nothing can keep us from trying to walk across them.
No matter if our heart breaks into millions of shards and love bleeds life out of us, We still hold on.
If it is the one.
Because it’s love.
Because we need to keep the chains to break them.
Because love is louder than all the pain.
It may be a losing game but it’s all we’ve got. And at the end of the day it’s better to love and not be loved back than to feel nothing at all. Because only when we love we are alive.
“Love is a losing game” sings Amy Winehouse. But if we can’t let go of hope we can always try to fight for it. Try to touch the other one’s soul, the heart. Move them inside. Take their breath away. Maybe with something unfamiliar, something surprising. Something not opera but close to it because it’s all the drama we try to save from becoming tragedy.
Don’t hold back. Life is too short for this. Try to say how much you feel. And if it’s too much to say a word why not let someone do the talking (or the singing) who knows how to move us inside in a way that no more words are needed?
Let Thomas Hampson help you out with his breath taking version of „Do Not Go, My Love“… (You can easily find it on YouTube).