Without Love

There once lived a person without love.

Usually people say: love is when someone loves me. That is “love from the outside.” But this was a different case: this person had no love inside.

No one remembers how it happened. Perhaps, as with many, the parents had no time for him in childhood. Or maybe, being very small and helpless, he endured the horror of loneliness, even if only for a few hours — which were then an eternity — and afterward no one helped him cope with it.

All of that is not so important. What matters is that there was no love inside. And in its place there was a thirst for love.

It was a very painful thirst. The kind that is scary to admit, and even more frightening to admit to yourself. To admit it would mean once again ending up in that helpless loneliness where it is impossible to help yourself, and everything is given over to someone outside. And they might not come. Might not notice. Might refuse. Might even make it worse.

So the thirst was there, but he kept his mouth shut.

And he naively believed that somewhere in this world there is Someone who can quench his thirst. He didn’t know one simple, sad fact: such a thirst for love can be filled only by a special formula, which sometimes sensitive parents possess, and which somewhere deep inside is also in the person himself — but never in someone else.

That thirst and that faith produced a running in circles. Each time it looked the same. Our hero met a new person and saw that they had love. There it is, walking around, expressing it to others! And then in his heart a hope lit up that now, at last, he could quench his thirst. He opened his mouth and greedily placed it under the stream of love that another had. But it always turned out like mother’s milk: pour water, or tea, or exquisite drinks into an infant — he will not be full. Only mother’s milk can nourish him.

And where in the adult world do you get love-milk? People’s love is often plain water, and good if it’s clean at all. And even among those whose love is strong, fragrant, like exquisite tea — it still won’t be absorbed, because the body is still waiting for milk. But there is no milk in the people around. No one knows that very formula that can be digested.

So it turned out that after a few sips, sometimes sooner, sometimes later, our hero clearly felt that inside nothing had changed, the thirst was not quenched, and he had received nothing he needed from the other.

But, not understanding the formula, he began to blame circumstances and those around him: that it wasn’t the right person, that he was deceived, that they only pretended to have love in them. And our person would leave. And he would wander on with a closed mouth, looking around, hoping to see a new source.

So year after year passed, one person replaced another in our hero’s life, each time creating and shattering the hope of quenching the thirst for love.

And even the most faithful friends, whose love was unique drinks with fine aromas and healing properties, with time only caused our hero disappointment — bitter and unbearable. Their drinks began to nauseate him, he wanted to run away from them, for there was no more love inside.

The strangest thing in this story is that many scientists and researchers knew and wrote about the uniqueness of the formula of love that feeds a child’s heart. But it didn’t help. The person still believed he could get the needed love; he just had to search and find the One Who would give it.

I think the reason was fear. For if you admit that no one knows the formula, and it is useless to look for it in others, helplessness, vulnerability, hopelessness will draw near. And what could be scarier than that?

Therefore even to this day around us wander thousands of such people, with an acute thirst for love and the illusion that it is somewhere out there, that it can be taken from someone.