Ghost Lakes & Love Stories
On What Remains
“Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.”
- Hamlet; William Shakespeare
I learned recently that some lakes are formed from craters that are left by the impact of meteors, and it reminds me of love, how something alien can just collide with you and marks you in ways that you could not fathom being without.
Imagine the earth without lakes.
Imagine if the love of your life hadn’t crashed in to you.
Good people and relationships sustain us, like a cup that is filled, but romantic love shapes the deep spaces within us, like lakes formed over time.
As I dream of the sound and smell of rain uniting with stone to fill the space of impact, I realize you as well as I am someone’s lake.
When I think about true love, I always come back to the final round of the first Rocky movie.
Apollo Creed was the reigning champion and Rocky was just a pub fighter, plucked from obscurity because Apollo’s original opponent dropped out.
No one believed Rocky stood a chance.
No one expected him to last. And certainly, no one expected him to knock Apollo down, something no fighter had ever done before.
But Rocky refused to go down. He wasn’t there to prove something to the world, he was there to prove something to himself.
When the final bell rang, the decision was out of his hands. The judges would decide the winner. But Rocky wasn’t looking for them. He wasn’t listening for the call. He wasn’t thinking about victory or defeat.
He was calling for Adrian.
Through the chaos, she fought her way to him, pushing through the roaring crowd, desperate to reach his side. In that moment, nothing else mattered. Not the judges. Not the outcome. Not the title.
Then, the announcer’s voice cut through the noise: Split decision—7-8. Apollo wins.
But Rocky didn’t even notice.
Because he had already won.
Adrian reached him, and they fell into each other’s arms. She clung to him, breathless, whispering the only thing that ever truly mattered.
“I love you. I love you. I love you.”
This was what victory sounded like.
True love is like a ghost, everyone talks about it, but very few have seen it.
- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
(Absence) increases great loves, but diminishes small loves. Like the wind fans a bonfire but blows out a candle.
And I think that If you’ve found the one, it means you can overcome periods of absence.
In the later Rocky movies, Adrian dies from a hard fought battle with cancer, and Rocky seems to carry the weight of her death like it was an injury. Like a piece of him went missing.
“They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation.”
-Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
“Part of you is gone which means part of me has gone missing as well.”
I am reminded of Aristotle, when he says that true love is one soul divided amongst two bodies.
I find familiarity in this analogy of love as a spirit, something that clings to life, something which refuses to die.
Rocky didn’t just go the distance with the champion. He went the distance in love too. Love in a way that is eternal, even if we are not.
- Lake Jonathan