Love Lessons

¡Hola! Everybody…
In a rush today! Prepping for my Thursday Women’s Prison Workshop… I'll be gone all day. Today's blog song is officially my summer song of 2008! Have a great day!

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Love Lessons

“The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.”

Just to set the record straight I am 53 years-old and for most of my adult life, I have been a committed bachelor. I have had countless relationships, many casual, a few serious, but for most of my life, I have been single by choice. I have no regrets. I like it that I’ve been single for that long and consistently. With the exception of one woman, I have never married, though I’ve lived with women over the years. I am not looking for a long-term relationship – nor have I ever.

Does the above sound like a hopeless romantic?

::blank stare::

Exactly!

I am as far removed from the archetype of the hopeless romantic as you can get. Women -- women looking for serious relationships stay away from me – well at least the smart ones do. LOL!

Yet the fact remains that you will be hard-pressed to find a more romantic man than yours truly. If you’re the object of my heart, you will feel as if you’re the only woman in the world. I will write poems in your honor, make exquisitely and excruciating slow love to you, perform solitary parades to celebrate your returns, and mourn your departures. You will remember our first kiss because the attention to detail devoted to that most anticipated of moments will make you wet with appreciation.

I am not a “good guy.” I’m the man your mother warned you about. In the end, you may hate me when it’s all done, but you will remember me.

LOL

I have broken countless hearts and have had mine shattered into a million pieces so many times, I no longer even bother trying to put all the jagged shards together. It’s there, this heart of mine – open.

Welcome.

I share all this in the interest of transparency because the one thing I bring to the table is my honesty – my earnest desire to be as real as I can be. Later you may scandalize me, but you will never be able to say I wasn’t true.

My first girlfriend – real girlfriend – was named Emily (ugh). I was twelve years-old and I can remember that dark winter night when we first kissed and what song was playing over her transistor radio (Mellow Yellow). I remember I closed my eyes (I always close my eyes when I kiss), and I remember we kissed on a dare. We both liked each other, but I was too shy to do anything about it and one of my cousins dared me to kiss her and we did. It was a delicious kiss. My heart thumped. After that first kiss, we would meet every night in the hallway of 704 E. 5^th St. and kiss. One day she let me kiss her nubby breasts, which I kissed tenderly, and another night I ventured and felt the moist wetness between her legs. She moaned…

We almost broke up because my cousin, who was jealous, insisted that a blister on Emily’s lip was some kind of sexual disease (it was a fever blister). Eventually, her mother caught us kissing (on the rooftop), we weren’t allowed to see each other, and when the summer recess came, they moved far away. That was my first heartbreak (and hers).

I would fall madly in love again at 14 with a girl named Milva. Milva was intelligent, wrote a lot, and was one of the few people (and certainly the only woman) who could keep up with me intellectually. I was extremely shy and when we made love, it was like a poem the way it unfolded. We made love under the boardwalk in Brighton Beach. I loved Milva with all my heart and we were the most popular couple in our high school. Milva had jet-black hair, large and intelligent cherry-brown eyes and a petite but curvy body.

Dang! We were so hot for one another!

Milva left me one day for an “older guy” (someone in college) and that was a devastating loss. It would be a while before I could love again in that completely open and fearless way. Afraid of rejection, of being hurt, I turned to literature and began reading all the “Great Books” of the Western Canon. Having lost at love, I explored my intellectual side and I drank greedily from the cup of knowledge.

But I always moved between the landscapes of my heart and mind and in many ways, I was in love with love. Towards the end of high school, Milva would return to me, but it was too late. Besides, by then I had Mona, a fierce Milva rival. Mona of the cinnamon colored skin, the insatiable need for sex. God! We spent a torrid summer a coupe of years after high school in each others arms. She even threw out her husband. We made love everywhere and every which way. Mona was the first woman would gave me her ass willingly. Life was good! LOL

Over the years I searched for the ideal way to love, sometimes through the eyes of that 12-year-old and occasionally with the wisdom of a maturing young man.

We all have a 12-year-old inside, that adolescent boy or girl in search of the perfect love. Our stories may be different, but we bring them into all the aspects of adult relating, influencing our styles of communication, our conceptions of intimacy, our degree of sexual openness, our values, our hopes, and our dreams. And because our stories are different, we sometimes collide, confronted with the inevitable conflicts of love. Until we make these internal stories conscious and become fully willing to explore them with our partners – with understanding, patience, and compassion – we will never know true intimacy.

Without intimacy, life withers away. As many great poets have noted, we need each other, deeply, in order to survive. When faced with love, we find ourselves reflected in the eyes of another and, if we’re able, we can grow together through the stormy search for self. In love, our souls can unfold – like a rare and beautiful flower. We embrace, we discover each other, we grow, but still the mystery remains.

I have never found the perfect love of my idealistic adolescence, but I found myself instead. And the voices I’ve encountered along the way – the books I’ve read, the people I have met, and the stories I’ve shared along the way – these are the seeds from which the man who stands before has grown.

Yo soy el hijo del cariño y tambien de la dulzura.