Love as Childhood

I remember Love as I remember childhood: both vivid and vague, distant and ever present. I remember love as a goal to reach…no, rather a goal to be reached, but not reached for. Love as something to happen in spite of, not because of. Not like other goals was Love; not a thing grasped at and fought for, but a slowly occurring phenomenon, like high tide, upon us almost before we know it.

I remember Love as a magical thing; almost embarrassing to even admit now, but once true. I think of Love as childhood. I remember the call of Love most vividly. Not its glaring reality, but its fringes, its edges, which pulled at the subconscious; a feeling almost exactly like agony, but oh, so sweet. I remember that Love from long ago, or not so long ago, as years are reckoned, but eons in the heart.

I remember it in stages, like acts in a play, and I remember its color and flavor and all its hideous machinations and its way of sliding along the edge of reality like a peripheral sunset, all encompassing, and unreachable.

And then it was upon me, in memory. It was a full feeling, like overstuffing, like ripening. It was a sickness in the way it tangled mind and body into a mess of emotions and used me as a plaything, then, tossing me to and fro. And I, chasing after it, ever, even while in its grip, like some ethereal opium addict… and just as addicted.

I don’t remember where I lost it, by the way: that feeling…no not the feeling, but the ability to feel it, rather. The anticipation of Love and the pursuit, oh yes, those things are as strong as ever, but in my steadily advancing age, young as it is, I seem unable to reach that cathartic moment of actualization, that moment of bursting; that end of all things, and eternal vanishing in one moment- Love. Are loss and regret its only remaining catalysts?
Is it even truly a memory?

It is accompanied, too, perhaps gladly, perhaps not, by the loss of the other side of the thing, the shadowed face, that of love lost (which is to say: grief) and that of mourning. There are strings attached to Love you see, and when those strings are severed, regardless of time or distance, there is a great unraveling in the soul. There are strings that exist in me still, some pulled taught in anticipation, strings that will strain and pop inevitably when those whose Love I still hold die. Held by family and friends, mostly, these strings are, arguably, the most important. Those are constants –grounding cables- and they hold me to the mortal coil, if you will. They hold us all.

But new strings of Love, un-platonic and uncontrived, strings born on halted breath and grown on heightened pulses, strings that strengthen rather than deteriorate with time: I wonder now if ever they truly existed. I am impatient; I know this about myself, and have known it. But the impatience I feel over this dilemma is not akin to boredom; it is the dawning fear that perhaps those strings have all been burned away, that perhaps the very ability to form Love has been lost. Or worse, perhaps that it never existed as such, but only took on a stunted half-life in the eyes of a child, like moon-cast shadows…like so many imaginary things.

This is no new crisis; in fact, in the grand scheme of things, it is utterly banal, done and redone, beaten into dog food.

But it is new to me. And it is terrifying. And not magnificent, like horror, but terrifying in a slow, plodding, rolling way, much like the high tide, upon us almost before we know it. And perhaps that is why this terror tastes so familiar. What is the word for the fear of fear?

And so, without that, or the hope of that, or the twinkle of that possibility on my horizon -ever waxing, ever waning- what now will I await?