I don’t have many words in me this evening, as I sit down to write this week’s blog.
I do have a heart and mind filled with memories of the Love that Chuck and I shared for 24 years. A Love that sustained and energized me and made me feel passionate about life. Memories that ease me and torture me all in the same breath exactly because they are memories. Long in the past. Times lived with him that are, as the raven quoted…nevermore.
My go to at times like this, when it just fucking hurts to know it’s all over, is poetry. Reading what the great poets of the past, and in the present, have written about Love, and I share them with you here.
Socrates said…
Love is a madness. The madness of Love is the greatest of Heaven’s blessings.
Love is of immortality.
Pablo Neruda says…
Every thing carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats that sail toward those isles of yours
that wait for me.
Christopher Poindexter writes…
if you were
to undress
the light
in my eyes
you would
find your
soul-
swimming
like wind
through chimes
into my bones.
Neruda also writes…
but I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth
and upon the wind
and upon the waters
until they found me.
Chuck and I wrote words of Love to each other frequently. In cards. In a special notebook I bought for us shortly after we married, where we could write to each other and then prop it on our pillows to be found when we wandered into our bedroom. He would write in that notebook before going TDY with the AF, and I’d find it and read his words every night until he returned safely to me. 
I wrote to him of my agony after my brother and mom died within 6 months of each other, when I couldn’t find words to speak of it to him. We wrote to each other when we fought, opening the space for discussion. We’d write for no reason other than to say I love you. I feel loved by you. I cherish you. We wrote these words and we spoke these words and we lived these words, because, after all, Love is an action word.
Love.
Love matters. It’s really the only thing that matters in life. Strong and healthy Love. I think of romantic Love as the highest form of Love; it gives us an opportunity to give fully of ourselves to another human being, and fully receive in return. It gives us passionate kisses and arms wrapped firmly around us. It gives us winks across the room and smiles of encouragement. It gives us swirls around a dance floor and fingers entwined. Romantic Love gives us strenuous sex and languid sleep. Love gives us a place for our hearts to call home.
I trace the words Chuck wrote to me as I read our notebook. His handwriting makes me pause and sends me back to what we had and what we were to each other. It’s what I have left of him. Of us.
I’ll leave you with these words from JmStorm…
and in the end i
was left with nothing
but the memory and the
love. perhaps that is
the way it was meant
to be. love in its
purest form and in its
final chapter that has no end.
Love.
It’s what I live with.
It’s what I live for.
It’s all that matters~
