Lessons of Love

When you are in love stars can fall at your bidding the moon can swallow the sun and love` s moment itself is a perpetual miracle a trip to outer space. Those unable to find another love agree that loneliness is the perpetual fire after the first love, there is no other. I have fallen in love ten times out of ten with light, dark, tall and short girls, all claimed they loved me but who has nurtured the undying love? They passed through my heart like comets which faded across the sky. What is the meaning of love? I remember names--only names as they erode into my nostalgic past. I remember the trysting tree how I waited in the dark like a hunter night` s next of kin lying in wait an angel emerged from the dark. I remember nights I ran back home feeling like a king, a conqueror after some triumph over sweet romance a lover` s hope, wish and bliss are nothing but wandering wings. Eight years after exchanging love for love like clothes I got married to the one girl on hand happy but gripped by the fever of wedlock -- and was I fortunate? Marriage is more than a lotus meal dreams fully wake, no longer a joke from doing the dishes to settling the bills from throwing tantrums to hugging and kissing it` s hard to abscond from the vow. True love cannot be borrowed or sold. Now I know what others have known for ages that we can learn to look on love as a gift taken from nature` s palm but teenage love is timorous and the thoughtless youth is in the hour of ignorance severed from lessons of endurance. Is love a game of chess? Sometimes I wondered what`s next we have been to the top, bottom and between at other times we marvelled for seeing the airbus land where we took off --it s always been the same the same face and the same laugh I have always known and courted for years without wavering or faltering. How else can love be explored? I have never come closer to the riddle than when I lie in the sun counting my blessings like beads, or when I stare in her eyes to find that the sweetness I have known in her is not overshadowed by fear, solitude, pain or grief.