Twenty Five Notes on Love for Valentine’s Day.

Happy Valentine’s Day to all.

I sought to write about love on this blessed day, the day of love, the day of St. Valentine’s, but my article was still incomplete, and needed to be polished. I paused because a formal definition and discussion did not capture the spirit of the subject I wished to write about.

Then, I revisited some of the notes I had written from November 2023 to March 2024 (I have added some notes since the publication of this article), about love when I fell head over heels for a woman I still hold in high esteem and admire, I understood that this poetic approach was more honest, sincere, and accurate. And though they may not inform what love is to anyone who has not loved, and though an alien species may not understand what nonsense this is, anyone who has ever loved from the depths of his heart will, and I am content with that.

The following twenty-five notes on love described the sentiments I have felt when remembering a woman I deeply loved, loved from the depth of my morrow, a woman I wanted for a life companion, a woman to call my own and to protect and serve and who would raise our children. In my heart of hearts, I wish she would tell me that she loves me as well, but that is not for me to decide: I can choose whom to love, not who will love me back. I am slowly forgetting about her, and from time to time I remember her with fondness and yearning, though I give her as much space and try to move on with my life.

Though that love has been unrequited, I am thankful to have loved truthfully. To love is the most pleasant feeling in the world, and those butterflies that flutter in one’s stomach do not tickle but fill a man with hope and yearning. Though love as well, when it turns sour, or when the flower zooms out of view is horrible and acrid and cruel. The reader will notice that the notes start wonderfully, filled with hope and strength and vigor and life, and they end with relentless agony and despair. Such is love, and as a coin or a magnetic field, one side cannot exist without the other.

I hope that these notes lighten your day, and may they help you describe your love to your beloved, and at least know, if it doesn’t work out, that such is this mundane life. Enjoy!

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1.

Love is like the air in the balloon: It is structureless out of the nylon fabric, but shaped and defined within it. And when it feels like nothing outside, it gives the balloon a body that resists pressing, yet gently accepts that which it was given.

2.

Love is the worm’s path through the soil, where the sunrays do not intrude but are ushered in warmly. And the maze of tunnels is supported, for they do not collapse unto themselves because love holds them in their place and guides the elements of the world to their functions.

3.

Love is in the first images of the morning, for how fond our eyes are of opening and absorbing and collecting, the one after the other, against the sharpness of light on its raw flesh. Only in love can pain be endured with decorum, and the prisoner lifts his shackles with grace.

4.

Love is the word on the moon when the sun emerges from the flatness of the water. And in the day, the light seeks the night. And when the energy of the day is diminished, the sisterly stars read aloud the word on the moon. Then hope is regained, and the word is pursued again.

5.

Love is not very much different from God in the Aristotelian tradition: For, if He was the being of thought in contemplation of thought, It is the active contemplation of itself. The lover and beloved are suspended gods who exist through contemplating each other eternally.

6.

Love is the dust of gold scattered in the furnace, on the scaffolding, at the smith’s dwellings. How hard it would be to collect them when they shy from sight. But their value lies within them, for they once formed the whole that was worthy. And in loving, we seek that wholeness.

7.

Love cannot be explained by pions and neutrinos, nor can it be examined when it wrings the heart of another man taut. The scientific understanding of love is through experience, just as the Aquinian Logos became flesh so that it may know of flesh; and the word of love is love.

8.

Love is the raindrops nourishing the soil. And out of the soil comes the fruits of the earth, their tendrils festooning, and the trunk shooting to stir the clouds. And the sweetness is created from the bitterness of the ground. And the lovers are the flowers, converting all.

9.

Love is the eternal flower whose thorns clutch at the pillars that hold the sky aloft. In mounting ever higher, the petals are doused with glorious sunlight, and sweet dew wells into its cup. And perhaps that’s what makes a flower: a newfound appreciation of being in the world…

10.

Love is the mass of droplets of ventilated blood engorging the face of innocence with the nectar of youth, rushing to the tip of the mount where the wildflowers fume their early morning opulence, mellowing with verve the dullness of the early break of dawn when the dim stars ebb.

11.

Love is that long rope with tendril lacings and springing wild flowers nourished by spring rains; each flower is a memento, an image of the beloved. We climb with soft caution lest the bloomlets be crushed. And we rise ever higher to remember all the while why there is a path.

12.

Love is beyond the planted kiss, plugging the exit of tempting words from deepening the intoxicating sentiments. It is beyond the crippling embrace that halts time at the magical moments of divine union. It is beyond the relief of toils and troubles which all flesh is heir to.

13.

Love bears great fruits, though it is bitter. Its seeds are jagged with claws and harnessed if only they were buried in nurturing soil. Where lover and beloved are in constant search for each other, they deplete themselves and find one another often when the flame is extinguished.

14.

Love is in the crestfallen man. It is in his tattered heart. For he stands up after the loss to revive the smoldering ruins of the bonfire only to light up the torch and set camp elsewhere. For why should love only be in the elations, and not in the troughs: Is not love eternal?!

15.

Though the world burns, the heat cannot penetrate your embrace; all that is left is your warmness; no sound save for the beating of your heart. The cloak of tenderness isolates even the harsh rays of the sun from my soft eyes which have become accustomed only to your brilliance…

16.

The more refined, the denser, the stronger the love, the likelier it is to collapse under its weight. Gravitas is no longer bound above, for your conception distorted truths long held firm, and no longer can they structure the straining void of emotions.

17.

The bracelets of gold occupy my thoughts. And how wanting am I for my heart to be the pot on which the gold is molten, then cast upon you the rings of ceremony, your eyes pleased, the soft smile of satiety and contentment melting the mold and onto you embroidered a sacred gown.

18.

To love is to find identicals unsubstitutable, to add a special essence to one, and to see an absence of Venus in the other. And how else may love exhibit than in a fluctuation of the beats of the heart when that embodied essence rematerializes in a place not very distant from us!

19.

What luck do I beg for to have you suture my wounds, to extend the soft arm of security over me, to make me feel again the world is good and worth living in and for in your presence. How I value your kindness, and how scarcely you supply it to me, how madly I beseech you for it…

20.

If only the beloved can be jettisoned from our hearts; if only the mind can dispose of the memories of her whom it loved; if only the hope of her coming back would vanish; if only we could banish her etched image to realms not to be treaded. If only she was here for us, if only…

21.

If the heart knows, it knows that the knowledge of the heart is flawed. But the mind, full of understanding, knows that it is of little use to go against the heart. For the heart will crush itself in seeking what it wants even if it does not know the what and the why and the how.

22.

The heart burns white as it adores in silence: And what can it do but to pump the air, hoping a parcel of blood rushes in—if only by mistake—to carry the passion that sustains the embers of love within it to the beloved, who, up to this moment, is unaware and uncaring; and cruel.

23.

To love is to be blindly obsessed and in torment. The engines run the machine to exhaustion and the machine has to keep on going for the expectations are great. But what of these expectations that are necessary and impossible?

Love is a curse and we are in love with our curses…

24.

Man (n.): (1) An object with an unquenchable thirst for intimacy, yet seeking it precisely where it may not be found; (2) a rational animal that is willing to dispose of its rationality in satisfaction of a desire it does not understand; (3) a creature with the capacity to love.

25.

There is a nimble cog that’s slightly out of rhythm, a loose screw jittering, a bolt that is not fastened tightly, that in the working of the machinery of life have halted the progress of love and have lost me my beloved, the one who would inspire vigor into my now empty shell…

And thus, the series of notes on love concludes. Happy Valentine’s Day to all.

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I was tempted to bring her a bouquet of flowers on Valentine’s day. I thought that maybe she was too shy. Maybe I rushed it all. Maybe there was a chance she would love me if I had played my cards right: Maybe I should have approached her at another time, or brought my mother, or did anything else. Then I remembered something that did not please me: I was very direct and honest with her about my feelings, and she brushed them away. There’s no grace in going to her again, for she has to approach me, and I am not very sure if I will accept her into my life again due to her coldness. Maybe I should forever forget about her and never look back, even though I see in her the motherly love I wish for my children, the sisterly support she would bring to our union, the daughterly innocence that would inspire my masculine urge to protect something that would be very dear to me. It’s probably just not meant to be, and the hearts of men will forever be broken.

Surra,
February, 2024.