THRUST BACKWARD

Let's say you have a high-definition television. The picture you see is vibrant, crystal-clear and almost alive.
Then, one day, it breaks down. So you pull out your old, regular-definition set. And suddenly the view is less colorful, dull and flat.
It has lost its life, its reality, its fullness.
It's far less than what you once knew.
That is the reality of life after love.
One day, with the one you love, your eyes have been opened to an entirely new world and a suddenly fresh and vibrant new life. It as if you and your heart have been awakened from a decades-long sleep in which there were dreams kind of like this, and yet nothing close to this amazing.
Everything is more real. Even the mere act of taking a breath and blinking take on new meaning in this revised and overhauled reality. Every heartbeat is a drumbeat to a new way of living, changing your walk through this existence from a slogging march to a break-dancing, free-form expression of pure joy. Your feet barely touch the ground, if, indeed, they can find terra firma at all.
And then, without warning or hint, you are unceremonially thrust back into the world you thought you'd left behind for life. It's as if you were blind for decades, been allowed to suddenly see and experience real sight, and then gone blind again. You almost wish you'd never been allowed to see at all, because then you would never know what you had been missing. Or what you now will miss for the remainder of your life. Because you never will see like that, march like that, live like that ever again.
Not unless the one you love will return.
And that seems very unlikely, if not entirely impossible.
It's as if the bank has repossessed your Hi-Def TV and handed you a 10-inch black-and-white with rabbit ears and told you that's all you get to watch from now on. It would remarkable if you'd never seen any TV before, but how can you go back now that you seen what can be?
How can anything ahead in life ever compare to the love you know and have known?
Indeed, how?