I do not think that pain is inherently romantic. But souls often come to understand relational pain in modes and rhythms that may deeply partake of romance’s character and flows, and thus the two become associated in and as our lives and minds.

This situation finds some of us romanticizing our pain, and we then enter into a strange form of darkness we may confuse with a sort of poetic or even mystical insight; but it is most often, in my experience, largely a sense of sentimental nostalgia laced with a confusion that arises from the similarity and intensity of the relation between our emotional core and the forms, memories, and images of love.

These become enmeshed in our hearts and minds during the processes that comprise such experience, and when we contact them ‘after the fact’ their resonance is at once agonizing and emotionally seductive.