“EVERYTHING YOU LOVE IS VERY LIKELY TO BE LOST, BUT IN THE END, LOVE WILL RETURN IN A DIFFERENT WAY.”

This is a quote that helps me a lot in my healing journey and I can find true meaning for myself. Especially now today for reason I don’t wish to share. That why I want to share this today here. It’s by Franz Kafka who was a novelist and short-story writer, he never married and never had children. He lived from 1883 until 1924.

When he was 40, he was strolling through Steglitz Park in Berlin, when he met a young girl crying her eyes out because she had lost her doll. Together they looked for the doll without success. Then Kafka told her to meet him there the next day and they would look again for the doll.

The next day, they still didn’t found the doll and Kafka gave the girl a letter that was supposedly written by the doll that said, “Please do not cry. I have gone on a trip to see the world. I’m going to write to you about my adventures.”  

That was the beginning of a story that continued to the end of Kafka’s life. 

Every time when Kafka and the girl would meet, Kafka read aloud his carefully composed letters of adventures and conversations about the doll, which the girl loved. Finally, Kafka read her a letter where the doll tells them she had come back to Berlin and he gave her a doll he had bought for her. “This does not look at all like my doll,” the girl said. Kafka handed her another letter that was reading: “My trips, they have changed me.” The girl then hugged the new doll and took it home with her.  

Many years later, the now grown-up girl found a letter tucked into an unnoticed crevice in the doll. The tiny letter, signed by Kafka, said, “Everything you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.”

This story, this quote, tells me about replacing a love that’s lost and within my last relationship, I found so much truth in this that I was reminded about this quote and story. The love this man has given me has proven to be very healing. I feel blessed that we met. Thank you, Ali