Islands

For the last few days I have considered some of the poems that I have written. I have considered the fact that there are so few in there whose topic is actually about being in love. About the moments of love that exist. There appear to be a great number aimed squarely at falling in and out of love but much of the middle ground is missing.

 

So I decided to start making headway into writing some of that middle ground, and I found it immensely difficult to even think of events or situations that would be the embodiment of that love.

 

I started to suspect that my problem was that I have never actually been in love, so I did not fully understand what it means to be in love. It is a foreign land that I can only peer at across an immense ocean.

 

Occasionally I have been thrown headlong into, what I believed, where the sandy shores of that distant isle. Alas they were the cliffs of a much closer island, an island that we all occasionally land upon and believe it to be that fabled land. The terrain looks similar, it has the same lush foods, and the same exhilaration of waterfalls and rapids but there is an immense fog that floats over this isle, it blinds us to the dangers that lurk in the many dark places here, it leads us in an assumed safety across rolling fields filled with the most beautiful flowers. Until suddenly we reach the event horizon of that fog and we realise that we have fallen off the cliffs of lust.

 

People sometimes experience lust and mistake it for love. They believe they have touched that special place with somebody. Maybe they did, the border between lust and love is a difficult one to map. Perhaps the measure is that the moment is shared between all parties involved. I have felt exceptional lust towards a few people that have entered my life and I am reasonably sure if circumstances had followed a different path that those feelings may have developed into love. Though somehow in my mind, in hindsight, I know that to be rubbish but in the moment that those feelings occurred did I know that it wasn’t real? As I sit here considering that question I am pretty sure that I knew I was just playing along with the feelings letting them run away with me.

 

I think from an historical stand point we have been rather brain washed with the concept of falling in love with someone within minutes of meeting them. Whether it be Greek mythology or Hollywood block busters we are constantly spoon fed such concepts as being quite normal. Maybe when society was much more ordered and women were creatures to be owned and exchanged for favour this thought worked for an assortment of romantic and practical reasons. However dragging that concept kicking and screaming into the 21st century where everybody has choice where everybody has the right to find and choose there lifetime partner. Maybe in that environment love at first sight is a much more difficult concept to grasp.

 

But still, we are brainwashed with the thought, but still it is our ultimate desire.

 

So what would love at first sight be? Obviously the affected parties are unlikely to fall into each others arms decreeing there eternal devotion to each other as social etiquette isn’t that kind. There would have to be a mating game played. Motions would need to be gone through. Affections exchanged, kisses shared, moments lingered in. this does all take time though, so what does love at first sight mean? Maybe it is a concept borne purely out of hindsight, maybe once the mating game has been played the players will look back and realise the connection that was felt from the beginning and suddenly label that as ‘Love at First Sight’

 

In fact I can see that there can only be two types of people who are in love. Firstly there will be the group that were friends for a while beforehand, a couple that had moments but never truly realised that there could be something between them until some encounter showed this to be a possibility. The second scenario would be strangers that meet and fall for each other. If after a particular amount of time this second group is questioned I am sure that the majority would suggest that they experienced love at first sight.

 

As a child I spent quite a considerable amount of time around cars, and hence also spent quite a good degree of that time rummaging around car scrap yards. It always occurred to me the number of perfectly serviceable cars that could be constructed from all of the assorted wrecks that were there. All it would take would be the time to sieve through the wrecks for the appropriate parts to complete the one working vehicle. You could randomly walk up to a particular shell and decide that that was going to be the one you would make complete. Only to find after considerable hard work that a vital component was missing perhaps the methodology would be to find one that appeared to be reasonably complete and work up from that point. At the end once you have your serviceable vehicle you would look back and say it was obvious that that one was going to be it because it was the most complete to start with.

 

So maybe that is all love at first sight consists of finding a shell that is most complete and just keep building. Maybe half way through the build you will realise that there is a vital component missing and you will need to abandon that build and find a fresh shell. I do suspect that once you had found your shell and built your serviceable relationship you would look back and say that it was obvious that it would be that one as it was so right to start with.

 

So the next time we are wandering around on that strange new world, and the fog has descended upon us. As we travel the fields of gold, and ride the rapids we should remember that the road to love does travel along the pathways of lust. However we only know the pathway won’t plunge us over the cliffs once the fog has lifted a long time down the road. I am sure that love at first sight does exist, and happens constantly around us, but the participants never realise it until they have travelled a long and winding road to that distant isle. Once they are there it will be blindingly obvious. Until then they will just have to go with the gut feeling that there might be a serviceable automobile somewhere in the future.

 

But as I have said, I have no idea what I am talking about when it comes to that distant isle. So perhaps all of this is utter tosh.