Love?

    I have loved. I have been loved. I have also suffered infatuation. I say suffer because infatuation whether puppy love or a teenage crush (regardless of actual age) is nothing more than  unrequited love. It feels like love but since it is not reciprocated its one-sided character is depleting and painful — thoughts, feelings, desires going out; nothing coming back.

    If wisdom accompanies aging, the older you get the easier it should be to distinguish between love and wishful thinking. Unfortunately that doesn’t always happen. The loud “zing” from heart strings being strummed can be deafening and it can overwhelm good judgment.

    “Ah, take the cash and let the credit go,” according to Omar Khayyam. Savor the heart flutters for their joy of the moment but wake up and smell the coffee and move on. No Waiting for Godot. The train doesn’t stop here anymore. Dreaming for something that will never happen is foolhardy.

E.E. Cummings speaks well of heart strings being strummed whether it’s a beginning or an end:

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands