Life or Death?

Edgar Allen Poe once wrote:

  "The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and the other begins?"

    I think about this quote from time to time; not out of some dreary fascination with it, though it is a very scary thought put into a beautiful syntax. I think about this quote because it is very real. Relationships can die, either literally in that one person actually dies and leaves their body. Or relationships can die, not by age or illness but by a prolonging of time and distance or of anger and sadness. 

   Romantic relationships can straddle the blurry line between life and death. You can know that something will not work out no matter how much you want it to, but in that moment you could be engaging in an act with your lover that makes  you feel utterly alive in every sense of the word. It is possible to watch something live and die right in front of your eyes in the very same moment. 

   And the hardest thing is those people or relationships, that though physically or emotionally dead, refuse to leave. The living presence is gone but the memory is the thing that haunts with a fervor that has a life of its own. That's what is really hard with relationships. They can be detrimental to you and they can hurt you and you can see them wither away and die, but as long as the memory remains, they also remain as alive as ever, but always out of touch or reach. This is what makes the getting-over-someone process so hard. These relationships lie somewhere in that shadowy area between life and death, when the line blurs and becomes difficult to specify.