Categories
dance love poetic

Yours ’til the wheels fall off

Life’s been flowing really smoothly lately,
such that the year is passing quickly;
and somewhat lacking in moments of stunning catharsis.

Yesterday was summer. We danced out at the Evergreen campus
in the main square while students sat outside on the grass
and forgot their studies in the sunshine, eating healthy
lunches and watching the grass think it’s spring.
Unseasonably warm.

Talking with Emily about love, and the process of saying
“I love you” for the first time to someone. We were together
for three and a half years, but almost didn’t last out
two months because she told me she loved me and I just smiled.

The summer just before Emily and I met was an odd one.
Theo and I had arrived home from France in June,
and we spent the entire summer hanging out at a dive,
writing poetry and philosophy and talking about relationships.
I also assisted with a french class on campus,
where I met a young woman named Whitney.

Perhaps it was post-France fervor,
or a misplaced, overzealous confidence
now that I was a world traveler;
I walked the neighborhoods ’til four in the morning,
I left notes and flowers, wrote poems,
stared at the stars and sighed melodramatically.
I belonged in 19th century Paris that Summer,
burning at both ends, a bottle of absinthe in one hand,
pen and paper in the other.

Whitney gave me the runaround for awhile,
I came to terms with a lot of things and mellowed out.
It ended abruptly, somehow with no loose ends
though we never talked to resolve anything.

The summer trailed into Fall, and the Russia program.
I knew Emily was going to be in the program,
because I’d talked to her sister, Anne, over the summer,
and she had mentioned it. Anne has mentioned it to Emily
as well, and told her to look for me.

From such simple chains of events are life-altering
relationships formed.

My summer rambling and roamings had left many ideas
lingering in my head. Two of which:
People say “I love you” too much, and why?
Would it be possible to emote love obviously and often
enough that ever saying the words would be redundant?
And more sensibly, to never say those words without
first being absolutely sure that they were true,
and that I could live up to the promise that they made.

A relationship isn’t a sterile lab, where one can
test the ideas one’s posited on paper alone in
the bowling alley restaurant while horse-racing
played on a 20″ television and people bet in the bar.

Even so, I think the ideas are sound.
The first, perhaps only if you’ve discussed it,
and you’re on the same page.
I’ve come to think there’s no harm in saying the words,
a thousand times an hour each day, if you mean them.

I stand by the second more strongly.
You can’t tell someone you love them
just because they want you to.
I’d like to think it was noble of me,
but who’s to say it wasn’t just needless torture?
I delayed a month before I told Emily I loved her,
and I was sure of it when I said it,
but we almost didn’t make it through the month.

We give these words such power over our happiness.
Inversely, they have such a bearing on our sadness.

It’s a good thing we have chocolate.