A Woman

I know a woman. You would know I can’t tell you her name, if you knew everything. I can’t even tell her of her name. But I find myself drawn to her in powerful, unmentionable ways.

It hasn’t been this way for the entire time I’ve known her. It’s only been this way for, well, a relatively short time.

I know she’s all wrong for me. I can’t even say she’s beautiful. Still, her smile is as bright as a sun, and renders her visage gorgeous beyond description. Thinking of her casting her smile my way grasps my heart and squeezes it to tears, knowing as I do that I will never be able to play with gentle kisses upon her brow and lips.

I can’t escape this yearning every time I think of her. Why? No one knows. It’s just the way things are. I’ve come to know that the way things are is largely beyond our comprehension.

But it’s hopeless. I’m a cripple. I wouldn’t burden any woman with myself, much less expect that any woman would care to do so. So what I feel for her remains unfulfilled.

Still, it’s an odd thing, you know. I find such an unfulfilled yearning to be the most perfect of loves. It is limitless, enduring. It never resolves into the sort of peevish disillusionment that is the sad denouement of so many loves.

It is a love that will stay with me to the end.

I’m a poor lover. I’ve come to know this. Because for me the truest love is always unfulfilled. For me love is hopelessness, loss, resignation, sadness, and tragedy. I’m a truly romantic lover. What others regard as love is to me mere ordinariness. A short interlude of lust followed by years of mutual tolerance, highlighted by all the expected milestones of a bourgeois, Biedermeier existence.

Mine is the sort of love such people read about from time to time, as they wonder why there is no longer such passion in their own lives.

Still, I think they fail to fully grasp its ultimate tragedy.