Famines

Ponder on it as an ailment. A sovereign sickness, a plague that elects unpredicted moments to bloom. It springs at its own chosen time and arrives like a vengeance from a hidden space where no one can describe nor visit even in his wildest imaginings. Love. The most exhausted word in the glossary of humanity’s communal emotions. Analogous to the rising and falling of the seasons it revels in its proverbial mystic: so close like a whisper, so elusive like familiar ghosts. It is a deep well brimming with secrets and foolish mortals that we are, we drink in its effervescent cup and intoxicate ourselves with delusions of romance. It excuses nor sanctifies no one. It blankets every innocent dream like midnight.

We seek to cancel our emptiness in pursuit of a certain tenderness; there lies our private thirst: that another soul will retrieve us from unspeakable miseries of isolation. This is our obsession, our supreme hopefulness.

We fall in love, or rather, we delude ourselves with its manifestations. We translate its ambiguities with cliches of long-stemmed roses, sweet confections wrapped in pretty ribbons, we even barter verses inscribed in charming cards dreamed by poets who scribble in drunkenness of sadness.

We comb the cyberspace like navigators steered by constellations of criterion and wants. Like dreamers lured in the web of fairy tales we rummage around for sparks, even in the far flung corners of linkages and pages, our growing sadness humming along the steady streams of frustration and despair.

Yet we persist, because like an explorer burning with consuming flames of finding a desired closure we aspire that a complement tucked somewhere along a disordered trail is waiting to embrace and make us whole. We click through one more page, one more link, one more optimism in finding that fleeting longing for permanence. We become thralls of this covetousness and it is less difficult to plant another weary step forward than slide back into the lonely confinements of isolation.

Love’s sweet rewards come with thorns and deceits and only the enlightened, the jaded, the determined is courageous enough to cross this one-way alley. He is the wise one who knows and braces himself to the palpable possibilities of bruises and the most profound of hurts.

He knows. He surely knows. And in the dawdling blaze of wistfulness, melancholic longings and threats of grievances he chase after that smoldering fire. He is not a stranger; He is the familiar reflection staring back at store windows. You will find him past the hours of midnight, tossing and turning in bed, jealousy nibbling on his earlobes. He struggles to dissolve the injurious mental image of someone else's affectionate hand touching the skin of his loved one. He vigils like a devoted sentinel. glancing with pounding heartbeat for when the YahooMessenger will blink and the username of his desired will flick into a bold presence, announcing a much-yearned arrival. He agonizes over emails that fail to arrive, inventing possible excuses in defense for their delays. Two minute lapses in response to even the most inconsequential text messages drive him to indescribable anguish.

He is the one who swims in the fluctuating cadence of his expectancies and curse the slow orbit of the night under his breath. Dawn will come with a pledge that somewhere in its awakening minutes the beloved will arrive, radiant like a lucid epiphany.

Bear with his clouded judgment for he is the one who tiptoes around legitimacy of sound arguments, weathered wisdom, sufficient logic and sensible reasons and only the beloved's first innocuous hello can nullify his gaping hunger. Eventually he’ll wake up from this madness, but for now let sense and reason pursue their own truths. For now, let him sink in his famine—because he knows no other way how. And for now, just for now, that's all the reason there is.

~ ~ ~

Happy Valentines Everyone!

Most especially to you, the source of my spontaneous bursts of laughter, and the tender proof of my defeat.