The Love I Want

I wonder why I never thought it strange that Juliet would press a blade to her chest just because Romeo’s breath had stopped. Why Orpheus would walk barefoot into the underworld, past the dead, past the shadows, past every warning ever carved into human fear.

They were young.

They had whole lives waiting for them

other lovers, other futures, other hands that might have held them gently. And yet they chose death as if it were simply another doorway to the person they couldn’t bear to lose.

What was wrong with them? Layla and Majnun, Antony and Cleopatra, Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai all of them leaping into the dark as if love were a torch bright enough to guide them through it.

Sometimes I laugh at them. Sometimes I pity them. But sometimes once in a while, in the quiet hours when my heart forgets to be cautious?" I yearn for that kind of love.

The kind that makes death look small. The kind that makes fear irrelevant. The kind that makes the world narrow to one face, one voice, one heartbeat.

I know how it ends. I know the stories. I know the price. But aren’t we all going to die anyway? So why not die for something as foolish and noble as devotion?

Why not choose a cause that asks for everything and gives back a feeling stronger than breath, stronger than comfort, stronger than the body that holds it?

Wouldn’t you like to feel stronger than death?

Still, I wonder. What does that kind of love feel like? Will I ever touch it in this lifetime? Will it arrive quietly, or crash into me like a storm? Who will they be?" the one whose name I would follow into any darkness?

I wonder. Oh God, I wonder.

Reviews

[Chris Shaw]

A love so consuming, that death is a better choice than living without the significant other. Pause for thought. Maybe depends on who else is left behind. A mother would stay for her children. Lots to think about here and I like the history you have woven into this piece Kasey. Happy Monday.