They Break Apart

Loves and lovers are parts in a play acted from need or passion, necessity or happenstance or duty or merely not to be lonely for a while. Loved in considered or unconsidered ways, given or withheld, perhaps with tenderness, perhaps terror, conscience or unconsciousness, in dark rooms lit by a single bulb, in the sunlight of bluets and corn flowers, on a stage, with a script and other actors, an audience, and the potential for success or disaster. If terrible enough or not attended to, the play closes after a single performance, finished almost before it’s begun. It may enjoy a long run, the audience growing larger with each recital. Most though become mere skeletons draped with the dry skin of life, a dragging-on rote performance bereft of passion. They end this way. They break apart. They just do.