The European Experience # 96

You do it to yourself. Or at least I do it to myself.
My love affair with the writer has come to it's expected end.
This could be love, but I don't know what love is. Instead of capturing 'love' to put it in the straight jacket of 'definition' in order to ever-so conveniently place it between 'like' and 'lust' in the dictionary, I would rather do as the poets do and drown in possibilities of the word's manifest presence in this wide wide world. If this is love, it is not the love of marriage or commitment, but the love that lives and dies within the metaphorical life span of a gasp for breath: quick, short, intense, and a necessary act of life.
It is not an external force that exists in this wide wide world that, upon coming across the shimmer in the corner of an eye in a night club or the warmth of lips curled into a smile from across a class room, shakes a person to their core. It is a product of an inner ineffable need. It is an innate idea born in the darkest, most hidden recesses of a soul with no reason or logic to substantiate it's existence: It is a product of the imagination. "Every kind of love, or at least my kind of love, is an imaginary love to start with..." (Some may argue for Darwin or Freud, but science and psychotherapy only aim to kill the beautiful mysteries of life such as the 'true' nature of love.) Mr. Humbert Humbert, the world's greatest lover (and being so he, of course, is a work of art) enveloped himself in a completely selfish love affair. Our greatest romantic hero loves the perfection of the idea of his Lolita but not the flawed, but human Dolores Haze herself. Mr. Humbert Humbert a puts it aptly: "mirage and reality merge in love". He loves the imagined idea of Lolita as he sees her in the real and present Dolores. Such is the case with all 'true love'; it is a need that gives birth to an idea that we project onto an unknowing victim. Yes, some random stranger that smiles at you as you saunter past a cafe in some European capital may inspire love. But, as this wide wide world has the power to inspire, it is a need within which arouses the artist to create something beautiful. The creative construction of a lover is an art.
My love affair with the writer has come to it's expected end.
Did I tell the writer how I felt? How I "love" him? Of course not! Saying the word would destory the poetry of my reality. And love, or at least this love, is utterly self-indulgent and selfish. It matters not if our feelings are reciprocal, only that they are requited. And even if he did not shower me with his affection, I would still revel in the existence of my imagined love, which reveals its mysterious to me, manifest in this wide wide world.
I am sad to completely understand the true nature of our temporary tryst.
But, alas, I have done this to myself.
And though such experiences can never be reproduced,
I would do this to myself over and over again and again.