Philip JohnI thought about you yesterday afternoon. I visualized us both standing in a field. But instead of sunshine and flowers all around us, an abyss had opened up before our feet. Lately this kind of image has been haunting my imagination. Whether it is an intuitive warning from my brain based on fact or simply a random manifestation of my fears, I do not know.
When it happens, I stare into the abyss and the abyss reflects back doubt and heartache to me. Doubt about the future of us, heartbreak about the possible beginning of the end of our love. Do you feel this of late? Do you see the abyss too? Or is it just me? Your eyes are always bright when you are in my company and your laughter is without shadows, like the laughter of a child without a care in the world or an adult so busy with work she does not have time to consider impending tragedies; she can only inhabit the present moment. So it must be just me then. I am the abyss maker. I am the deviation in our once joyful, perfect equation of love. What an ordeal it is to love.
Short Story: Small Town Girl With A Big Choice
When love grows old
New love is tender and promising. But old love must weather many storms. A single bad storm can sink our ship, turn us into strangers overnight. Friendship is so much easier. If you and I were just friends I could say, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do that. Is it OK?’ You would say, ‘Sure it’s OK.’ Then we’d laugh, drink beers, and I could sleep without worrying if our friendship has gotten soiled. But love has a deeper hold on me; I worry about love. Love is a seductive master who forges a blazing ideal in the furnace of my spirit. This ideal exhilarates me. But it also enervates me. I realize now this is because I am always secretly waiting for the ideal to be destroyed. And this interminable waiting, this hoping against hope, is what creates the abyss. This is my conflict then: I feel most alive when I love you but loving you opens up abysses before me too.
So I can neither love you nor forgo you. It seems I must simply get used to this vertigo, this dizziness I feel each time I look into the abyss.
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