the love of the ancients

I had heard about what love could be – passionate, like a storm, sweeping and raging through youthful hearts, bringing longing and fiery compulsions. It would turn the world upside down and inside out. Everything before and after would be agony, pent up for a moment, and only being together could bring sunshine and joy. That’s not to say that wasn’t how it started for me either.

I danced and stuttered, and sang like a drunken sailor serenading his beloved, agonizing over every detail of our conversations, and steered every aspect of my life in her direction. But soon, slowly, it began to tire me, and I realized such relationships had very little grace about them. They were too desperate, too self-conscious, and nothing to do with me. In them I found fear, a fear very close to cowardice, of having found and lost another, a fear of being forgotten. And so I sought a slower love to tend with devotion and patience, that would grow with every passing day. Like the fires of the ancients, I would bide my time and hum her a melody.