Lust, Love, and Loneliness

You tell yourself that you have a fecund, overripe imagination, the type that upsets the order of your life and that of the one you set your eyes on. And yes, you have set your eyes on her a long time, way back in time, when you turned 21. She set your heart on fire at first glance. And then you looked at her again and again when she was not aware of being watched by you. You took in her beauty, her physique, her intelligent face, and her intellect (you almost fainted with excitement when you later found out which school she went to). The more you looked at her, the more you regretted you had been lazy and ill-disciplined when you were in your early teens. But regardless, you knew you had fallen in love, sight seen aplenty, but you knew nothing about your beloved, not her name, where she lived, what foods she liked, what books hshe had read, and what her dreams were. You knew nothing, and yet you knew you were in love, but you were a coward despite her giving you signs of encouragement like she always smiled nicely and shyly at you when you stepped inside the library and how if you showed up late, she would show signs of relief and joy when she looked kup from her lecture notes and saw you finally appearing at the entrance door. As you are writing these words, you travel back in time and the memories are choking you because you realize with blinding clarity of how stupid and insecure you were.

Yes, you fell in love with her with a swiftness and tenacity that had not existed hitherto and henceforth has not been duplicated. You did not just fall in love; you lusted after her with an intensity that you have not felt ever since.

They said spoken words are nothing in comparison with the written ones. If a man can write down exactly how he feels, then his feelings are real and clearly felt. Vague, amorphous feelings are merely vapid sentiments.

You hope one day you run into her. And this time, you will boldly seize both her hands and force her to listen to this long tale of loss and longing and show her all the poems inspired by her. You also will tell her about your life which has been chaos of slippages and blunders, a life lacking a narrative architecture, and how you have used words to bring order to this chaos. And of course, before you bid her farewell, you would ask her for her name, the names of her favorite books, the foods she likes, and the songs she loves singing in the shower.

Afterword:

All acts of creativity in music and poetry are attempts to deal with some strongly felt emotions. A man's true character and worth reflect in how he expresses himself about matters of the heart. Some do so in unrhymed and unmusical lines of crude and barren words and call them poetry. Others just can't help themselves. Words just spill and spew out of them till one day they somehow have the shape and sound of music, of poetry.

I do have an arrogance to hold an opinion that a man of sensitivity is a more evolved and developed being because a monkey cannot make music or write poetry. All it does is howling to express its feelings. An insensitive man does not do much differently. While in essence all humans are the same and thus equal in the eyes of the law, in reality there is a hierarchy among men, just like there exists a hierarchy in the animal kingdom. To be truly human is to know both our essence and the order we stand in relationship with everything and everybody around us. We can try to change our position in the order by being all we can be, with an understanding that nurture and effort alone sometimes can't transcend the nature under which we were born. In other words, each of us was born with a certain gift and a certain personality. That gift and that personality usually differentiate us from one another.