Valentine's Day

I am looking at the Earth with my own words.  From a balcony I have not yet been on, arm linked with my lover's.  It is Valentine’s Day and I’m writing Love down.  In the Lacanian sense, which is the post-Freudian, Daddy-smelled-like-rum-and-he-missed-my-birthdays, I can make up words ‘cause ammapoet sense. 

And that is my real lover.  Barthes, Neruda, West, Cummings, Garcia Marquez, Delany.  That is he.  Not my type at all.  That he is there: a decision, it doesn’t matter which until it does, until it is this particular decision, with this kind of hair, in particular, and this way of walking.  This way, specific way, of laughing and bickering that informs us.  Human. 

I spent a portion of yesterday with AB, a beautiful person, younger than myself, discussing love.  I threw some thoughts in, as one does in conversation, if one is opinionated, which I happen to be.  She did the same.  We didn’t agree on everything and that is a relief.  I hate to be agreed with by my peers in a discussion.  I feel as though I have failed to ask the right questions.  She did not fail.  “You think you got it?” she said, “What love is all about?”  Direct, frightening, daunting, even.  “It’s going to sound weird, but I think so, I think it’s a construct.  Not the warm feeling you get when you look at your mother or your really good friend, or your partner.  The thing that is a fantasy is that in-love feeling.  It’s totally irrational and I’m too rational a person to be pulled in by it," I said. 

I have been, many times, pulled in.  

“I can agree with you, rationally,” she said “but I still loose myself in it”.

Maybe I will be lost in it again someday.  Maybe I will stop looking for my Father where he was not, where he will never be: in my past.  Briar Rose will wake-up on her own, she may be old when she does, but what's matters is that she do it.  That she wake herself up. 

Happy Valentine's Day!