when we think about love and valentine’s day and everything do we ever think just of love or do we, must we, always think of someone whom we love whose love we enjoy—and do we ever think of that love without recalling the brilliant conversation we had with them and the feel of their eyes, or think of those things without also swelling up inside just in such a way that we feel a bit fuller and perhaps more complete; is it possible to separate our love from the person we love, from the experiences we have had together, from the feelings we have for them—probably not—but are any of these things really love, or is love commitment, is love security and trust and faithfulness and all the sappy things those counselors say, is it even that, or maybe is love chocolate (which might be closer to love than anything intangible, in the end) or love could be time, because heaven knows it’s easier to love each other when he doesn’t need to take pills for sex and when she doesn’t doze off in the middle of it (getting old will be wierd) or love could be the dust we’re constantly breathing, which only sparkles in the sunlight (inside the window on a warm afternoon they cluster and trickle through the air on the other side of the book in our hands when we look up from the words and think how quiet the world is right now) or is true love the serene dance of a slow flickering flame lit in a cathedral with thoughts of other altars (“be it flax or temple burn,” she said so many years ago, though true the words remain) or is love the music pulled from an old piano in a quiet room under the quiet graceful gaze of sparkling appreciation—but maybe that’s all just romance and sap and so much vapid hyperbole and love is making dinner in a bad mood with the kids making a mess in the living room, and still kissing in the doorway and asking how did your day go and letting a little bit of the bad mood drift away because, well isn’t that what love might be after all, after byron and shelley and keats and browning and shakespeare, they were probably just sappy and high on something, because love is probably much, much grittier than what they said; and is this a test of love’s grit, this distance, this grueling exhaustion of never seeing each other, tantalizingly abstract voices in tinny phones that can’t hold hands or capture an eye’s sparkle, is this the abused truth behind all those clichés about enduring love perhaps, well perhaps, and anyway it’s how we love each other for this day, it’s the tiredness of waking up every morning alone—but not for too long, and that’s the cleverness of it: endure a little longer, love, and all that is love, beautiful and ugly, we can find together—which is to say, from quite a distance, will you be my valentine?
2/14/08
