I am Hemorrhaging Love

Is it truly the way of the artist to have known this love and have no chance to reclaim it? We were children when we first met and often, when I think of her, I am a child again: a child of love. I am once more the child who believes. So much has happened between then and now. We’ve grown, we’ve matured, we’ve moved on and yet I still always come back. I cannot forget her, much less disown the intense feeling I harbor for her. She is the reason I can’t seem to love any other girl I meet, the reason I can’t seem to generate the same kind of emotion, the same amount of depth. Cupid, you wretched goblin, why stick me with arrows tipped with such poison? Dear Aphrodite, remind her of me, gently persuade her to remember what a strange and powerful connection we have had for so long.

I would save her again, gladly. I would give anything to be her lover once more. If she could be mine, and I hers, forever, I would let go of the glory I have so hungrily sought for so very long. I would give it all up for her. After all, is not that pursuit of, that belief and obsession in, my own greatness what drove her from me in the first place? I betrayed her heart, but O! I was only a boy then. She has resented me for it ever since. And in the wake of that deception, I could not respond to her on the level she required of me. I was begging continuously to remain her lover and overlooked that my first responsibility was to be her friend. Our friendship, our mutual passion for acceptance with another like ourselves was our common thread, the thread that tightened around the two of us so suffocating as to cut into the skin and force us to bleed into one another. How beautiful it was, and how blind was I!

There have been so many signs over the years that we’ve been apart that have proven to me that I require her presence to be whole. I have been unable to write with that sensual passion, that feverish boldness since then. I have been unable to receive romantic love, and without a doubt unable to give it. I have been relentlessly refusing to believe in the same beauty of the world. Though it is a terrifying and treacherous place, I knew once that it was still hiding the lovely truths, deep in the cracks, far beyond the molten walls, the hidden whispers of life fulfilling.

Dearest Michele, you loved me once, you may love me still, know that somewhere not so very far away there is a heart aching for you. Let us be friends once more, let us learn to love again. We are grown now, no longer schoolchildren sneaking glances as the other dances with a foe. We have come so very far in our separate lives that now we may just be ready to bring them entwined again. I know the stakes are so much higher now, higher than they may ever be, here in our early adulthood, but trust me when I say, with every ounce of truth I possess, that it is worth it, and that we can succeed.

I am hemorrhaging love. This forbidden photograph is haunting me. Like Narcissus and his reflection, I fear I might just waste away in front of it, staring at it, burning it through with passion, unable to redirect my longing gaze.