Your fear is not surprising.
It's always ended badly:
Fury, betrayals, recriminations.
Then, for days and weeks and months
An agony worse than grief
Because you also feel like such a fool.
Love is like diving or rock climbing:
Spectacular, but your heart sticks in your mouth
Every moment you're there.
There's an ease in not caring,
A looseness in the belly.
Then, as love approaches, a knot tightens like a snake.
Being alone and free is like looking in from
outside:
People give and get affection,
Are seized by extraordinary happiness and pain,
Live in prison and in heaven,
Deal with the necessity of working on what must be worked
out,
While you watch them as if they were on TV.
Life is full of love and difficulty.
Its riches cannot be gotten at except through choice.
You must enter it by loving this person or that person,
And people inevitably fall short of your hopes.
But to live and not love, and not be loved,
Is like spending your entire life alone in your room.
Copyright by Nicholas Gordon. Free for personal or non-commercial use.
Audio and Video Music: Allemande. By Wahneta Meixsell. Music free to use at YouTube.