A Love Story

TO BEGIN WITH

I was pondering what to share with you this week and this thought came to me about a love story I read on the Internet some years ago. I couldn’t remember the website and the exact words of the writer but here is my close rendition of it for everyone.

A LOVE STORY

I was an odd person. I had many questions about my life and myself. I was the kind of girl who couldn’t connect with another person on a deeper level, or a higher level, which ever the case. I had had too many blah relationships that I felt love was always out of reach. I was wandering, lost, alone, but dreamed that somewhere there was a person for me who would understand me and accept the bags of baggage I carried into my adult life.

I spent every penny I had on poetry books and music. I went without money for the essentials in life just to buy books and CD’s. No matter what happened to me, I could find answers in poetry and music and it became my constant companion. With these things with me… I knew there had to be another person out there looking for me the same as I was looking for him.

I had a friend who tried to write responses to notes, poems, and letters she received from a young man she wanted to marry. She came to me and I loaned her my collection of poems. The pages were marked with special prose; words that had significant meaning were underlined… sometimes twice. She wrote to him, using the words I marked, and eventually, she wooed him into marriage. But only years later, she divorced the young man.

I was sad for her because I knew of his depth and qualities from his writings for her. Years later, 20 years in fact, I attended a church conference and who should I meet, but the young man who married and divorced my former friend. He was older, wiser, and just as genuine. He was still the poet I had remembered. I was fascinated and 365 days later, I became his wife. Friday, July 18 will be our 25th anniversary, we are old and gray now, but his love never waned even a bit. He is the same person to whom I helped a college friend send poetry responses and now he is my husband.

In my cluttered and confused life during my 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s, I never thought that I would find someone who would complement me. Now, I am alive again, realizing that I was destined to be with him not only in this lifetime but for always. He still writes poems, but this time they were all for me and about me, and smiled when he gave them to me daily. He smiled the way I heard him smile a thousand times in my heart, and during those moments I felt that the long wait was worth more than enough.

His poems affect me more than those done by poets of my first collection ever did. He has inspired me, and given me tickets around the room and back. He has bought me roses like everybody buys roses everybody. He has pushed the clouds away and he helped me find what is hardest to find… me. He’s just a man who needs and wants, I love him so very much because he can touch that inner part of me, connect and understand me the way no one can. He has caught me in the warmth.

Now, we’re in our mid-70s, and he’s very ill. I know I am going to lose him in the next few months, but it’s all right. We know our spirits will meet again, but the separation until that day would seem to be too unbearable for me. I’ve been re-reading to him his poems and we’ve been listening to his music every day now. They will be my companions when he goes. But what I do know is that whatever happens, we are still together. There will be no goodbyes.

Raymund's Random Thoughts

Always means forever. Not awhile.

Aim for the moon. The worst that could happen is you’ll miss and end up tumbling to the stars.

If you stargaze long enough, you learn that no two fireballs or constellations are alike, and the star that shines brightest is often the one most different. Resolve, therefore, to be unique by being you.

Poem of the Week

VI 

by Emon

I do not have to be with you
to be with you
nor feel your embrace
to feel your embrace.

Knowing you are there,
wherever there is, is enough.
To think of you and know that one day
               some day, some when,
we’ll be side by side for always
is all the always that I need just now.

I do not feel this way because
we are apart this moment,
my awareness comes from waiting
for you all my life and so
a few days, years, whatever more
is less than all the years I spent
hoping you would finally come
               until you did.

However brief the times we have
so far spent within each other’s arms
is time enough to see me through
this absence of yours
however long it may last.

Do you love me?
Somehow I know you do.
I feel it each time the moon
               grows fuller
and rainbows emerge on a lifeless sky.
I feel it every time I hear
birds singing our music,
every when the wind hums
blowing every tree.

Do I love you?
A shameful question
               deserving a shameful answer.
Can you fit the ocean
inside a child’s beach bucket?
All these years,
the definition has not changed.

- from “Drafts”, 2008

Thanks for stopping by - see you next week.