[Concerning love there is much I could say]

by Eric J. Evans

Concerning love there is much I could say nonsense perhaps but here it is anyway when I was young I suffered from a debilitating love-deprivation an absence that became a huge void that became my entire wide-open empty world and I was given to much agonized grandiose and naive lyricizing about love or more properly what I imagined love was and there were of course the many inevitable discouragements flops and crash-and-burn failures of love I experienced along the way but in time most of my bullshit ideas about love ran their course ran out of whatever fuel they had and faded away and I was left with nothing but my own plain and paltry life and at that point I was finally ready about that time I met Heidi on our first date we sat in a cafe on a bright hot summer day brilliant sunshine filling the window above our table and at some point I mentioned my interest in the ongoing question of how far my own self extends out into the world and later thought oh jeez why did I say that she's going to think I'm really crazy and I'll never hear from her again but I did hear from her again and I came to find that she is also interested in the same question and maybe she did think I was crazy but if she did she didn't care much our lives came together in a natural easy way like two rivers merging and we have this peaceful and beautiful life in common but I've come to have another further understanding of love something I never felt or understood when I was young which is that mature love is built on a deep bedrock foundation of fierceness this force is in me all the time now a quietly urgent imperative to defend our shared life with whatever it takes I'm just a peaceful poet and musician but I walk around with this awareness in me always this strange inner sense I've found which must go back to the beginnings of the human race and makes me wonder at times what things I might be capable of in extremis and when I walk around town I see other old codgers and I look at their eyes and I think deep down they must know this kind of love too if you live long enough life eventually leads you to this love it is a love deeply rooted in the earth and as I enter my old age that is who I am I might look like just another old fool but I feel that fierce core in me and there will be no backing down from anything in life not from anything not ever