I look at the moon, I listen to the silence. Maybe living also means feeling my heart beating for love, and enjoy the feeling, even though I am alone and simply hoping for something impossible.

I wrote this many years ago, on an old school notebook. I was sat on a bench at around nine in the evening and I felt utterly alone. Depression made my boyfriend leave me, and I missed him and loved him still, after two years. I came to the conclusion that we would never go back together, still, the feeling was lingering and I could not make it go away. So, I wrote this piece.

Love helped me, even if the other person did not love me back. It helped me because in the vast emptiness and desolation of depression, I knew I could still feel something real. That feeling was the only one which was strong enough to break the ice that formed around my soul and come to light.

I used that feeling for everything. I thought about the person, and that gave me strenght to do things. Mind me, I was not carrying on with my everyday life for him, rather, I thought about him to summon the feeling and then I channelled that energy into something else.

Love is complicated, and it was making me suffer until I decided to only use the good part of it. Forget the feelings of hope, the melancholy, the sadness. Let’s just take the excitment, the joy. Let’s use it for something else.

And that’s what I did. I recognised that if I could love someome else then it meant that I was still alive and capable of love, so I just tried to use that ability in other things.

I believe I started volunteering because of unrequited love. I just did not know where to put all this good energy until they offered me to help in a hospital for disabled children. All my love was used there, in every day care for those kids who were in need for company and love.

Unrequited love also made me understand that I could love by myself. I did not need the other one, I could love anyway. And it made me realise I needed to fall in love with life first. Loving life can never go away, and that love will always be there to help you when other loves leave, that being the love of a partner, a family member, a friend.

I understood that I needed to love myself and life to make me whole, so then I could meet someone else without the fear of breaking down if they left. Those years of unrequited love were dark ones, lonely ones, in which I felt worthless and despicable. But they thought me the important lesson of learning how to be on my own, and how to channel positive energy into good things.

So, if you love someone who does not love you, do not let yourself go. Think: where can you channel that energy into? Who can you help out? And be happy to be in love, at least you know what it feels like.

Let me know your thoughts about this. Is unrequited love only source of sadness? Or are there positive things in it? I am eager to read your opinions!