LOVE?

LOVE?

I would lie awake next to her and trace letters on her back as she slept. I would write the words “I Love You” again and again lightly as if the love I felt for her would penetrate her skin and caress her soul. I wanted her to know my love for her deep in her bones.. My loving her was no secret to her or anyone. I showed her in many ways: in poems, unexpected gifts and bringing her to special places. 

I loved holding her hand in silence. We might be walking slowly through the park or sitting looking out at the lake. I felt closer to her and surer of her love in our silence. There was no room for lying or confusion in the silence.

We were lovers from a world that didn’t exist except in our making of it. It was I who was the true romantic though, not her. She enjoyed the Walt Disney love story I wrote for her each day. We talked quietly on the phone from our separate rooms in our separate homes. Hanging up was too much like letting go and neither one of us was ready for that so we’d fall asleep cradling the phones.

Each time she began to leave me for someone else it would break my heart and each time just as I began to get over her she reeled me back in. I was her love trout; she was fishing “catch and release”  but I wanted to be kept and taken home for dinner. Without my knowing and until I did know it-we were playing different games. My game had an end and it was “happily ever after”.  Her game had no ending-just a loop of catching and releasing again and again and again.

Finally it ended and ended badly like all first loves’ do. How else could it end? The heart is never given so fully nor broken so completely than the crushing disappointment of that first true loves’ demise. 

And then there is the silver box containing all the real and unreal memories of how “perfect” it had once been. And this box is pulled out again and again to compare with each new possibility of a  relationship. But by comparison, all attempts to recapture the innocence and trust to love that freely had to fail. There is only one silver box.  

The only hope for the future was that someday the silver would begin to tarnish and reveal the dark foreboding cloud that was there all along. Others saw it and warned me but I was too blinded by the romantic fantasy I created and fueled. Maybe I never really did love her and if I didn’t love her, maybe I have never loved anyone. Maybe what I really loved was “love” itself. 

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