The blessing of a lover who never arrives is that you may wait forever in that state of delicious agony, anticipating a moment that will always float before you in splendid future perfect. You will not meet with disappointment or be faced with impossible choices. There will be no life-changing precipice to leap over. You may carry on, one day blurring into the next, growing older and less desirable, without the fear of having to confront the depressing realities of time’s mistreatment.
There will be no excruciating goodbyes because there will never be a glorious hello. You can dream about how it will unfold endlessly and never be wrong. That first kiss will be all you have ever desired, your first embrace will be the truest thing you will ever feel. His touch, his scent, his voice will always be, in that always yet to be future, sweet beyond imagining.
And there will be no others to compare with the lover who never arrives. They will have spent their arrivals in vain, squandered them on a woman who greeted them with a smile while glancing over their shoulder to the empty street beyond. She was only practicing on them. Only going through the motions. They will never be enough because they were present in the present, real and concrete in their hungers, hard in her hand. Already past. There is no adequate apology for their untimely comings and goings. They’ve betrayed her simply by being real, by allowing themselves to be caught in time and swallowed by its event horizon.
Never fall in love with a woman who is waiting. Especially if you’re the one who kept her waiting. Just like a little boy who, once in entranced by the woman wearing the shoe, learns to accept the impossibility of his desire and settles for the shoe, she has long since acknowledged the futility of you and has fallen hopelessly in love with waiting itself.
Projection is it’s own trap; while a comfort, as it is a way to console ourselves of our own failures, to shield ourselves from our own Fall, it is a failure in it’s own right. One never has to adjust oneself to the lover who isn’t there even if the pretending seems to call for it; they always adjust to us in our relentless silly dreams, no matter how elaborate the staging. And the dreams don’t cost. Love costs, and the stupid hapless romantics who refuse to pay are the misers, always absorbing, never giving, never risking.
Oh it’s a poem!
Thank you. I was beginning to worry about where I am in life. Such good advice – thnks again. 🙂
A
I will have
in the future perfect
my will
I will have already willed this,
long before I said it
when I responded to your voice.
You give me the past,
an infinity of passing sensations
woa. this is perfect. deadly accurate. 100% true.
You piece is touching and in a since true. Those that wait for that one perfect moment in time, that one perfect person that matches our soul exactly, are sometimes doomed to wait our lifetime.
The sweet angel that is remembered in the night. The scent of honeysuckle and cinnamon from her hair as it softly caresses your face, The soft tenderness of her touch mixed with the knowing that she alone loves you. Her kiss that sets you apart from all others. Her embrace, her love and even her warmth are all real to that person.
In some ancient circles, they would call this being enchanted by a holy vision or taken by the succubus or incubus. Now they label it as psychological disorders still not trying to understand. Some wonder at times however, are these people creating this or are they in touch with something that only they alone can describe and know.
For those so inclined, is it not better to live in the fantasy of their minds than for their perfect reality to be shattered by the painful truth of actual reality? That is the question we must ask ourselves. It is a question that can only be answered in a mirror from the soul.