“If we shadows have offended,

Think but this and all is mended:

That you have but slumbered here

While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding but a dream,

Gentles, do not reprehend.

If you pardon, we will mend.

And, as I am an honest Puck,

If we have unearned luck

Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tonuge,

We will make amends ere long.

Else the Puck a liar call.

So good night unto you all.

Give me your hands, if we be friends,

And Robin shall restore amends.”

~ Robin in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 5. Sc. 1

Oh to be lost in great expectations on the wings of a seagull guided by a fairy whose confessions are read in a bathtub after a very long engagement that spans the universe and goes into the floor boards to haunt me through the bedroom window where my love last lay, oh the turmoil of Wuthering heights, bring me over the rainbow.

I am hopeless for the insatiable pain and joy of love, the courtship, the lust of pirates, the lure of fairies and never land. I long for chance encounters and foreign seas. To be swept off my feet before midnight and seduced to a romance so pure that words need not apply.

I am a hopeless romantic, lost in a world of mystery, sorcery, folk lore and the suspension of disbelief. I choose to believe. To accept that there are vampires, and pixies, that pirate ships sail through the night air, and that when we meet by chance we meet for a reason. I can not deny the stars and the fortunes that will be mine, I will be the star, unconsciously waiting for Tristan to steal me away.

I simply can not help it. I love the ideas of love, but simple, pure love. I long to be courted and pursued ‘properly’, to do for the one I love in service and in duty. Love letters, flowers and curious surprises entice me, and entreat me to a life that seems so far beyond the realms of that which we live in presently. I suppose than I long for the pain as much as the ecstasy , and yet, the pain is seldom in the fore front of my thoughts when diving headfirst into the thought of love. But then in reflection, how many times have I fallen in love, how many can any of us? Is there more than one? Are they all lusts, is any of it any more or less real than that which Puck, as Robin, discloses to us as a result of his meddling? Is this all a dream, is every time that we fall in love a fall in lust? Do we make friends that we can be with intimately and we develop closeness with, but is this why so often relationships seem to fail, and yet why we have so many? Lust is easy, Love is in fact easy, it is the process of sharing time and schedules and life that gets tricky, this is where the romance seems to disappear. I think that we are mostly hopelessly romantic, longing for some form of pursuit, some form of chase, of desire, of effort, of display of attraction and affection. There are those who choose no part, to be removed, to spare themselves the grief and the pain.

Perhaps though, the other ‘they’ are all correct, perhaps it is better to have loved and lost than have never loved at all.

If we are willing to be alone, to grow from our losses before moving on then there is much to be learned of ourselves in our grief, and grief has its own means of being beautiful. The experience is enthralling, is enlightening is one of the few things in the world that drives us to the greatest depths of ourselves and humanity. Here in our despair we are capable of creating and finding beauty, here we are real, we are weak and strong and vile and graceful and forgiving and vengeful. Our grief is our duality, it is the quintessential expression of our greatest love and greatest despair in one curled up, tight fisted, sopping package.

Here is where our desires and our beliefs come to the surface, and it is here in this cacophony of emotion we are most pure, most honest, most deceived, by and to,  ourselves and others. Here I am. Here I chose to be, by choosing to love, by being willing to love again, I too must be willing to be broken and shattered.

I long to be sought after, desired not to better anyone, and not to better myself but to enhance the joy one already experiences in life, and he joy I can grow to find in myself. So come. Come and find me, hidden in my own devices, take me as I am, and take me with fury, bury me in sonnets and daggers, in whispers and under willows, for this is where I long to be forever, as a child, as with my child, lost in fields and bubbles, here peppered in sunlight waiting, with tiny fingers pointing to clouds, deep in an open field, shaded by a wise old tree, barefoot and dreaming.

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