Tag Archives: finding love

Bookish

I grew up in novellas and thick tomes,

Seeing sunlight filtered through dust particles dancing in the air,

Springing from the pages that held my very essence.

I was well-traveled through countries and eras

Through countryside with wildflower-air

And the musty scents of a busy city,

Accustomed to all sorts of gentlemen and ladies.

I don’t consider myself a romantic;

Fancy of whims belongs to ink and paper,

And I am much too grown up for such trivial things as love.

It was never something solid,

Never tangible unless I held the book containing it in my hands.

Love was just a pretty word used by desperate people. 

But I thought of love then

As I pressed carnation petals between the pages of a Jane Austin book,

Or hid roses in the folds of Oscar Wilde.

I dreamt of love as I read of things I’d never truly understood,

Like an actor reading lines of Shakespeare without comprehension,

Love fell short of its mark.

I don’t consider myself a romantic

I consider myself tragic,

A quality which spills like an over full cup of tea,

Staining itself onto the pages of my books.

I speak of myself through poetry and prose,

But never in a way that can candidly be made sense of.

My love has never been a person, 

But  personified in the ideas I fill my pretty head with, 

Making ladies swoon and gentlemen shake with passionate fury.

My love is in my elegance, 

My eloquence,

And my erudition,

Of which I owe all to the words of dead poets.

Being tragic I prefer being woefully misunderstood, 

Kept as mysterious as the death of Edgar Poe

And maintaining an air of troubled youth.

On Finding Love

All I wanted from love was someone who stayed. Someone who gave in equal respects as I and who wasn’t afraid of knowing me inside and out. They would be willing to learn me, like an oceanographer learns the waters of their craft, while remaining as amazed at me as when they first began to dip their toes into cool crystal pools in the summers of their youth, knowing there is so much more beneath the glassy surface; that it can turn tumultuous in the noon and become calm again under the moon’s gentle light, reflecting the sky so above and below there is nothing but the beauty of a world of stars.

Simple as it sounds, it is sure to be harder than imagined. Life is like that. Love, even more so. I’ve found it to be a fickle thing, not to say untrustworthy, but definitely ever-changing. One second it’s the most perfect feeling, making your heart soars as high as eagles, floating amongst the clouds. The next it’s torturous and frightening, like running in the dark, stumbling over yourself desperate to find that old light to save and guide you. It cannot be found by being circumspect but I am a being crafted by caution. Cold and calculating, I feel less with my heart than perceive emotions with my mind. Life has yet to place someone in my path that quiets those voices in my head and allows my heart to speak, to feel the other’s presence like a balm on my soul. But love keeps my hopeful. It’s a golden honey I crave with my entire being, licking lips and longing for a taste of that sweetness only love can satiate.