Love is not.

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

 Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

 Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

 That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

 Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

 Within his bending sickle's compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

 But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

 I never writ, nor no man ever loved. 

- Shakespeare

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Right, so my idea of love is approaching 500 years old. So what.

"...alters not when it alteration finds." Do you get that? Really? Stop and think.

We're all so caught up in change and adjusting to change and fearing change that we've forgotten all of the things that do not.

But that's the way of the world now, so I'm told. So I see, I guess. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing multiple times and expecting different results, right?

Yet here I am. Same idea, same archaic conceptualization of loving another being.

Yeah, I've said it before - when I use words like forever, I mean them with not subjectivity. I mean something along the lines of, "To hell with the end of the world, the apocalypse, the destruction of the universe, and to hell with the end of time. I will never give up on you."

And that sounds great...and I suppose has the potential to be great. But it creates this intensity that, to date, is simply too much.

The lines between one and another begin to blur, and it can get easy to lose yourself. I should know, I've done it.

At the same time, though? That lightning flowing through the veins when you touch, the way the mind melds itself to share a moment?

If you sought to prove, irrefutably, the existence of paradise to me, you would need only to make me remember it. 

I don't think I do anymore, not really. The synapses don't fire the same way anymore, even though the impression of the memory remains.

It's a lot like chemical reactions, as I've mentioned forever ago...the most spectacular ones are also the most consuming and dangerous, and often over the most quickly.

One can hope, though. Maybe someday I will again.

But tell me this much - Love alters not when it alteration finds. That is, love does not change when it encounters change. Your partner changes, and the feeling remains the same.

I see that as entirely possible, even simple. It involves a different perspective, a less-common way of looking at a human being...something deeper than a star sign or taste in movies.

Question is, can you see it, or am I just a raving madman?

- C