Love and loss

I'm pondering with a very heavy heart tonight the concept of love.  "Love" has captured the mind, occupied the fantasies and enraptured the bodies of the world for millennia.  But what is love?  And how would one decide whether they're in love or not?  Why does love last for some, and not last for others?  Why does one person love another when that love is not returned?  Why do some suddenly fall out of love?

I have wondered for many years if love is a made up thing, a legend, and nothing more.  Maybe it's like I believe religion to be; similar to faith or answers to prayers, maybe love is merely a thing that you convince yourself of, because you want it so badly.  Love could simply be something you decide (or decide not) to be "in."  

But something about love truly is tangible, provable.  I know this because I know very personally that heartbreak exists and it is an utter devastation of mind and body together.  It is palpable.  If love was only a legend and something we talked ourselves into being in, then it would be easy to talk ourselves out of the heartbreak when love is taken away.  Love is a real thing.  I wish it wasn't real at this moment because I want to bid myself free of love's devastation, but I can't.  

Why do two people fall in love?  I believe there is an ideal built up in the mind of each person, from years of accidental research:  looking, listening, feeling, comparing, talking, laughing, playing, touching, reading, watching others.  When one finds a person who matches this ideal, and the unlikely event happens that the other also finds in them their ideal, love sparks.  Miraculous.  How extremely rare and worth embracing is it when two people find each other in this complex world with billions of unique individuals, each having their own ideas of the perfect mate?  I experienced this once.  For me, like the palpability of heartbreak, love itself is a physical feeling that takes over the soul.  I don't know what part of the body, what organ, what system, produces the upwelling of bliss that becomes the constant state of mind and body when in love, but I know it is the best feeling I have ever felt.  An awakening occurs.  Everything in life becomes joyful.  Things that used to be mundane and annoying are no longer.  Appreciation for people and things increase.  Being in love makes me more alive and beckons me to become a better person.

Regrettably, when love is taken away, the void is so much larger than the space the hope of love used to take up.  It seems against the laws of physics and so unfair.  It probably would have been better if I had never felt it.  Unfortunately I have, and I can't wind back time and forget it.  I'm on a tearful search tonight for something to fill the hollow in my soul that seems likely to never be full again.