And Something Blue...

"There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the markof weakness,but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief ... and unspeakable love." ~ Washington Irving



    The scene is set. "The smile of Garbo, and the scent of roses, waiters whistling as the last bar closes, a fairgound's faded swings ..." [Thank you, Mr. Maschwitz, for putting it so beautifully]. Two souls stare into one another for ages as the lovers' eyes meet for an instant. I speak, of course, of romance. Romance has come to have somewhat of a mythic status in this day and age, but the art is still practiced by many with open hearts, whose lovelives are built around gestures, and brilliant displays of adoration for all to see.
    Some people believe that romance is dead. Others long for it - and still others actively seek it. But romance goes deeper than roses and serenades. There is a dramatic element to it, an unseen force that tears the heart to shreds, and may or may not remake it. Sometimes love is found by the heart, but not grasped. Sometimes it lies behind a pane of unbreakable glass, on display for the lonely heart to desire, yet oblvious to it. When romance takes the tragic form of unrequited love, the vital red of love shifts to a cold, moonlit blue.
    If you have never experienced the painful wrack of romantic misadventure, try to understand those of us who wear a tear on our cheek, and respect us as you do the dead, for we have died, and returned to life forever altered. We know who we are. We are the remains of once-mighty love, starved to death by cold indifference. We have felt unwanted,unneeded, unseen. And it has been our very invisibility which has been our undoing, for it blinded us to ourselves, and we could not see the inglorious position in which we put ourselves. Sure, we know now that we were too shy, that we should have made our love known, that we should have been more confident - or conversely, that there was indeed nothing we could have done to change our circumstances. But does this confession bring solace?
    It is one of the more difficult lessons to learn, when recovering from the shady blue night of romance lost, that sometimes the heart cannot have what it wants, or what it needs so desperately. Nearly everyone has a "one that got away", and some of us are unfortunate enough to have had something ever more painful - the one we chased away. But it is this anguish that teaches us our own power, and at best teaches us how not to wield it. The heart is a strong organ - strong enough to raze to the ground the self that we have built so high.
The hopeless love of an object above our reach - the forbidden love of one already claimed - or the shattered love of friendship, muddied with confused emotions - these are examples of the worst faces of romance, but think of their significance. Think of the aesthetic of tragedy, and the wisdom of woe. What if everything in our lovelives always fell into place? So many wonderful poems, songs,and films would not have been written, exploring and immortalizing the agony of missed chances. Would romance mean as much to us if it was easy? Would love have any value if it grew on trees?
    And yet, those broken souls among us cannot acquiesce to the wisdom of their own destruction. We cannot relate these lessons to ourselves, because to us it will always be too close, too dear, and the pain we carry with us deafens our ears to the truth. It is easy to lie under the weight of loss and sleep in haunted memories. It comes naturally. This is the frightening truth of grief. Sometimes, when the nature of our loss is in our eyes completely unfair,and so bitterly juxtaposed with our wishes, we may never emerge from the tunnel. We may never heal.
    But we must try. We must look up through the blue moonlight of the lonely night, and see on the horizon a hint of red. We must. Without even eyes to see a glimpse of hope, we are doomed to live forever in this terrible bathos. My hope, nay - my plea, is that we all survive the threat of our worst enemy - our fragile hearts. Somehow, some way, I hope we can all traverse the shadow and return to the sun whole again.