Love is like invisible algae

Several days ago, I realized that I have never written a love poem before, not a pure one that is.  I’ve been writing poems since I was twelve years old so that’s almost twenty years of poetry and not one love poem.  Well, I take out my pen and pour myself over the task, known here on this blog as “Winning”.  Then, I look at my phone this morning and I’ve been broken up with over a text message!

I will not get into petty details but it has come to my undivided attention that I do not understand love one bit.  Oh, I used to think I knew everything there was to know.  Oh, I used to think I was an expert, the crème de la crème of the love, how I would bask in it, how I would commit to it, how I would go to the end of the earth for it.

But listen to me now.  Love is like invisible algae.  Sometimes you can grasp it, taste its salt, but other times it slips right out of your fingers and you wonder if it was ever there in the first place.

Well I know this.  I may have been through the ups and downs of romances.  I may have had numerous failed relationships.  I have never been married.  Maybe I will never be a lifer, a no-matter-what committer, a wife.  But I have loved.  I have loved hard.  I am loving.  I love love even though it kills me sometimes.  But I don’t understand it.  Are marriage and life long commitment the ultimate expression of love?  If so, I can’t speak to it.

And I’m a thirty-year-old woman now.  I am no kid.  What is it, if not love, that I have been doing?  What are these sacrifices?  These time commitments?  What is the sweetness?  The kindness?  The passion?  The caresses?  The tenderness?

I love even though I’ve let go.  And guess what?  I think that’s love too.  I love even though it may not be the right choice for me.  I’ve loved more than one person in my life, and to some people, for a woman, that makes me a whore.  Well, I know that they know even less about love than I do.  I know that when and if I say “I do” it’s going to be because I mean it.  I know that I don’t need a ring to love.  I know that some people who do that do not know love at all.  I know that the people that marry for love I admire greatly.

But I will end this musing on love reiterating that I do not understand love one bit.  I do not know why love would lead you down the wrong road time and again.  I do not grasp why love would leave you completely and utterly alone.  I do not know why it is here for moments, for days, for years, and then disappears.  I do not know why it reappears in a different form.

And you know, maybe I have written love poems.  Maybe I have written lots of them.  Maybe it’s just too painful to look back on all of them, knowing that in real life it didn’t work out.  Maybe I have only yet to write a poem about marriage because the right person has not come into my life.

But now I’m convinced that this love stuff is really invisible algae.  It may be lovely, soft and graceful, a joy to be covered with, but it has slipped from my fingers yet again.  And this time, I don’t know that I want it back.  Here’s hoping I don’t slip into love amnesia again.