“Help is out there” – Rupert Young
This week, I would like to dedicate my writing to one of my dearest friends. Let’s call him RY. He is no longer with us, but his friendship and the things he taught me have remained an important part of my life. In particular, there are three words he once said to me that I never truly understood until years later: “Love is freeing.”
The Meaning of “Love Is Freeing”
One Saturday evening, I happened to mention RY while talking to my significant other. Our conversation reminded me of a relationship I had years ago with someone who became increasingly jealous and possessive. I reached a point where I felt completely tired and burned out by it. Having to reassure someone constantly, explain yourself or feel that your freedom is being restricted can gradually change the entire meaning of a relationship. It was during this period of my life that RY’s words began to make much more sense.
Long before that relationship, RY had tried to explain to me what love meant to him. He simply said, “Love is freeing.” At the time, I wasn’t quite sure what he meant. I remember him looking across the television with an innocent expression on his face as he gave me one of his philosophical explanations. It sounded dreamy and rather ambiguous to me, although I thought the wording itself was beautiful. Perhaps there was something of his Aquarius nature in the way he saw love: caring deeply for someone without needing to possess them.
At the time, I interpreted freedom in love as something slightly detached. Surely, I thought, if you love someone, you naturally want to hold on to them? Years later, I began to see what RY was trying to tell me. Love and possession are not the same thing. Giving somebody freedom does not necessarily mean caring about them less. In fact, allowing somebody to remain an individual, without controlling them through fear or jealousy, can be one of the greatest expressions of love.
RY and I eventually lost touch for nearly two years because of personal conflict in his life. We had once been very close, but circumstances pulled us in different directions. About two weeks before everything changed, I noticed that his WhatsApp profile photograph had been updated to a childhood picture of him with his beloved twin brother. I smiled when I saw it and immediately thought it was a lovely photograph. I wanted to tell him so, but I never put those simple words into a message.
It seemed like something I could always say another day.
The Day His Words Came Back to Me
By this point, I had broken up with my boyfriend and, rather than feeling heartbroken, I felt happy and relieved. I went into my garden with the feeling that something heavy had finally been lifted from me. As I stood outside, I felt a wisp of air brushing against my ears and heard the whisper, “Love is freeing.”
They were RY’s words, and suddenly I understood them in a way that I hadn’t when he first said them to me. I had just walked away from a relationship that had left me emotionally exhausted, and there I was standing in my garden feeling free. I immediately felt an urge to go back into the house, grab my phone and call RY.
Before I had the opportunity, however, a message arrived from another friend saying, “It must be hard for you.” I was confused because I had no idea what my friend was referring to, although deep down I sensed that something was wrong. Then another message arrived: “Have you seen the news?”
I looked at the news and discovered that RY had died.
I was devastated and deeply shocked. Alongside the grief came anger towards myself because RY had tried to reach out to me many times and I had ignored him. I had assumed there would eventually be another opportunity for us to talk and resolve the distance that had developed between us. Suddenly there wasn’t. The childhood photograph I had admired only weeks earlier became particularly painful because I realised how little effort it would have taken to send one simple message telling him how lovely I thought it was.
His death taught me one of the hardest lessons of my life: we often behave as though time is unlimited when it isn’t. We postpone conversations, affection and reconciliation because we believe another opportunity will come along. Since losing RY, I have carried a much simpler philosophy with me. If you want to say something, say it. If you want to do something, do it. There may not always be another convenient moment.
Two nights after his death, RY appeared in my dream. He looked smart, slim and fit as he walked down a stage as though he were about to collect an award. It was exactly how he would have liked to see himself. Years of depression had affected him physically and he had become unhappy with his weight and appearance, but the RY I saw in my dream looked confident and proud again. I smiled and cheered him on while he smiled back at me and the crowd. Rather than seeing the version of my friend who had struggled during his final years, I saw him looking the way he wanted to be remembered.
Three White Doves, Peace and Freedom
The following morning, I looked through my kitchen window and saw three white doves roaming across the grass. I had never seen them there before, and I found myself making a little Maggie rhyme: one for sorrow, two for joy and three for a girl. At that point, I had no idea that these three visitors were about to become a familiar part of my home.
The doves began inhabiting the space above my roof and stayed. Eventually, there was a family of them, and remarkably, my roof became the place they seemed to call home. White doves have long been associated in the spiritual world with peace, love and harmony, so their arrival immediately after my dream of RY carried enormous meaning for me. I have always regarded their presence as a gift.
Over time, the doves also came to represent RY’s words, “Love is freeing.” A dove is free to spread its wings and fly wherever it chooses, yet these birds continued to return and made their home above my roof. There is something particularly beautiful to me about that symbolism. Freedom does not have to mean abandonment or detachment. Something can be free and still choose to remain close. Perhaps that was the part of RY’s philosophy I had struggled to understand all those years ago.
The connection continued in other unexpected ways. On my birthday, I was rushing towards the platform at a train station when a sign caught my attention. It read, “Help is out there,” and next to the quotation was his name. Seeing those words on my birthday stopped me in my tracks because they reminded me immediately of the way RY had always been protective of my mental health.
For months, he had lectured me about not dealing with fear alone when I was in a fragile state of mind. One thing he said has stayed with me ever since: “Don’t go there alone, take your neighbour with you.” It was a simple statement, but also a profound one. He believed that when you are frightened or vulnerable, there is no virtue in forcing yourself to face everything alone. Asking another person to walk beside you can be an act of strength in itself.
For that particular message to appear on my birthday, accompanied by his name, felt deeply personal. It reminded me not only of RY but of the care behind the advice he had given me when he was alive.
A Second Chance to Reconnect
Years passed, but RY continued to appear in unexpected corners of my life. After mentioning him to my significant other that Saturday evening, something unusual happened again. By Monday, an Instagram account appeared in my notifications. It belonged to RY, yet it was an account I hadn’t even known existed.
I couldn’t help but quietly add him, despite knowing that he had long since left us. There would be no new message arriving in my inbox and no reply waiting for me, but adding the account did not feel pointless. Instead, it felt as though the universe had given me a second chance to reconnect with my friend in the only way that was now possible.
That unexpected notification brought me back once again to the three words at the centre of this story. I once thought “love is freeing” sounded beautiful but detached. Today, I understand it very differently. Love does not have to possess somebody in order to be real, and it does not necessarily disappear because a person is no longer physically standing beside us. The relationship we have with their memory can continue to change and reveal new meanings long after they have gone.
For me, RY’s memory has returned through extraordinary moments: his words carried to me in the garden, the dream in which I saw him looking happy and proud, the three white doves that made a home above my roof, the message at the railway station on my birthday and, years later, an Instagram account I never knew existed. Each experience has become another part of the story I still share with him.
Losing RY also changed the way I think about the words we leave unsaid. I still wish that when I saw his childhood photograph with his twin brother, I had simply sent the message that entered my mind: That is a lovely photograph. It would have taken seconds, but I believed there would be more time. That regret is precisely why I no longer underestimate the importance of small expressions of affection. We never really know which conversation will be our last.
Perhaps writing this article is my opportunity to finally put into words what I never managed to say then. It is also my way of cheering him on again, just as I did when I saw him walking proudly down that stage in my dream.
RY taught me about love while he was alive, but losing him taught me about time. The white doves brought those two lessons together for me. They are free to fly, but they still return home. They remind me that love can give freedom without disappearing and that letting go physically does not mean erasing the bond that once existed.
So this week, my writing belongs to my dearest friend: the man who once sat looking across a television and gave me a philosophical explanation of love that I couldn’t quite understand; the friend who worried about my mental health and reminded me not to face my fears alone; and the person whose words returned to me at the very moment I finally understood what he had been trying to say.
You were right, RY. Love is freeing.
Wherever you are, my dearest friend, I hope you are finally free.
Long live the memory of RY.
-Earl in the Unknown
Leave a Reply