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Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Love

Love is known best, most keenly, in its absence.

I wrote this first sentence late last night, hardly knowing why, or what it meant. It just came into my head. Reflecting on it now, it strikes me that the best way to know the full reality, the full force and meaning of love, is by losing it. Only then do we see the preciousness laid bare - and only too late.

The brother, the father, the mother lost. The wife, the husband, the lifelong friend. Immediately, one strives to touch, to embrace what cannot be regained. Now we know, and would act, and speak. Too late. Too late.

We see the things that were left behind, and clutch them to the breast as if they might magically become corporeal - the shirt, the hat, the coat, the glove. The scent is there, but no sentience. Everything has become invisible air, and every thought, every feeling, every word  made empty by the emptiness we could not have ever imagined, yet should have done, by the hour, by the day, by the year. Now gone. Time itself has been annulled and no longer exists.

Remember, therefore, in every present moment; remember while it matters; remember while love yet resides in the human form, for once it departs, it departs once for all. No magic can revive what was magic itself.

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