Remember “Love is…”? It was a one-panel daily comic, and the caption defined love in what could charitably be called, prosaic terms.
Love
is…holding him close at night. Love is…soothing away her worries. Love
is…everything, and forever.
I don’t claim to know what love is but I can
tell you what it isn’t. It isn’t everything. And it isn’t forever, any more
than life is everything or forever.
You go to school and you learn a language, long division, how a bill becomes a law. No one teaches you about love.
No one teaches you about feelings, except to
keep them to yourself. Deep down, where they grow like white mushrooms.
Life, says Forrest Gump, is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.
Maybe. Sometimes you know exactly what you’re
going to get. You know and you take it anyway, because you believe in love and love never fails.
Love fails alright. When you ought to leave but
you don’t. When it’s fear. But you call it sacrifice instead.
Ask the girl molested by her father if love never
fails. Or ask the man who molests his daughter if he loves her. He will tell
you that he does, and the woman who throws her newborn in the river. She answers, Yes,
of course.
You will say romantic love is different. Or you will say, that isn’t love, meaning, not
an act of love.
But love is love; sometimes love fails.
Love is not a weapon and the heart is not a
soldier, and you can’t always see what's growing in the dark.
When no one teaches us about feelings, no one teaches us about love—no one should be surprised by mushroom
clouds.