TASK #17

May 2nd--May 8th


Young Love


"It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all."   Samuel Butler


Ruminating. I've been doing a lot of that lately. It's a swell way to kill time during a pandemic. Oh sure, I have chores, and I put aside time each day to fight with my wife, or argue with my Gen-Y son about anything and everything, because he thinks he knows anything and everything. 

But I digress. Which I guess is just another source of ruminating. 

At any rate, I was ruminating about love. I can only speak to it as a man, and I can say this as a fact: we men are dogs, sure. But we LOVE love. We love with a deep, powerful passion that engulfs us. And when we fall in love, we leap into the abyss without wondering where or when we will land.

Now, we may fall in love more than once in our life. I figure that a grown adult male--over 40--will have fallen in love three times.

What do I mean by falling in love? You know what I mean. And if you don't, you've never fallen in love.

Of those three loves, one was probably a psycho who was sexually thrilling but so nutty that the memory of her causes involuntary shuddering; one is probably lying next to you now, the mother of your children and a woman who may or may not want to have sex with you.

That leaves one OTHER love--the one you never talk about. Especially with your wife. This other love may be someone you sat behind in 5th grade, or someone who dated your best friend, but it was probably someone you dated and you fell in love with, then she dumped you for someone else, or because she didn't love you the way you loved her, or in some cases, because she decided that other women were better life mates.

Whatever the reason, she's still there, comfortably resting in the small box in the hidden storeroom deep in your psyche.. And every once in while, when you least expect it, you think about her. It's discomforting, but...

That's okay.


TASK:


Put on your mask and gloves. Go to a supermarket. Buy this woman a card. One of those cards that has a romantic picture on the outside but nothing inside (these are usually more expensive than the cards that have some hokey sentiment written inside which makes no sense). Bring the card home and open it up and write down everything that you loved about that woman. Try to articulate the feeling you have when you think about her. And write down why you think you're not together.



Then close the card, put it in its envelope, tear it up and toss it away.