ASK anyone about love and they’ll give you an opinion, that is beyond reason.
Some say God is love, others say love is God. I’d say love is a spiritual root canal, a little taste of always and a big taste of nothing. At its full blossoming, it is verdant in full greenery; as it fades, it becomes nothing but the grand prize of a heap of rotting leaves.
They say that love is written on the stars. On the wind, it is succulent, resilient a thou- sand violins and red roses; champagne and magnificent kisses, hands caressing on yours delightful, de-lovely, an earthquake or a shock, allow- ing yourself to be catatonic. It is also blinking back the tears as a break up survivor of a mul- tiple fractured romance — the energy that animates life, that pleasant ache, the angst and the rapture.
Sometimes it could rip you to pieces when muffled in thick flashes of vile and indispens- able hatred. Love is a weird falsetto of humming things, a mental mist that makes you want to shower your mate with kisses (real or Hershey) in an ocean of romance, till it rocks your world and cleans out the fetid pockets of hate.
When life has been short on happily ever after, you could count on love. You can extract the elements of compassion, patience, regret, surprise, for- giveness and compound it to form the chemistry of an atom called love. Kahlil Gibran said that. Love is what you’ve been through with someone, meek and mild but from bone, blood and muscle; carefree or sane, short and sweet, long or ago- nizing; on the highest plain one minute down on the pit next, love the next, starving hungry but no appetite, hot and cold from excitement, full of hope and enthusiasm with bouts of depression that wipes you out. But the joy, nevertheless, is boundless as it pains and it heals, confronts and restores.
What does it take to love well and wisely? Risk and resilience in taking a chance on love. No- bel Prize-winning author Octa- vio Paz said, “To realize itself, love must violate the rules of our world.” Meanwhile, Ralph Waldo Emerson hailed, “Give all to love.”
“Why do people fall in love?” Poets and mystics tell us the reasons you fall in love are the same reasons for falling out: no one gets the exact love you want, only the love someone can give you. Love is the gift that can not be given, it waits until it is accepted. You fall in love because the sun shines, because it rains, because he is poisonously handsome or a Quasimodo, because he is el- egant and talented and gentle or a cad, a rogue, a snake. It is comprehensible!
Love does not appear with any warning, it is an inevitable event you can not control. No time to think if you’re head- ing for a soft landing or a rough ride. You fall into it is as if pushed from a high diving board, it is like getting hit by a huge truck, yet not mortally wounded.
Just sick to your stomach, high and moonstruck, feeling 16 with a 10-year-old heart.
Like a simple valentine tale, she’s been walking air happy these last couple of years wit an intolerably giddy heart.
It made her giggle that he will cringe when she introduces him to her colleagues as “my boyfriend.” Why? He is years beyond boyhood. But that is the way romance has thrust them both down and backward slide. And so, by what level, what language would she introduce, this renowned impeccable sur- geon of a certain age who has journeyed with her beyond dat- ing? Her partner? That is too ambiguous. Her companion? Too stodgy. Friend? Too little. Significant other? That is okay only on government forms. So instead of sliding back, she toyed with the idea of moving forward, if only to make the in- troduction less awkward, as in, “ I’d like you to meet the best interpreter of life!”
Have a rapturous Valentine’s Day, gentle readers.
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E-mail Mylah at [email protected].
