Romantic Musings: The Morning After Heartbreak

It is never difficult to persuade a romantic to fall in love.

Grant him passage into your heart and he will wander into the corridors of your complexities with the hope of discovery.

He will surrender his memories of heartache. He will recapture his innocence. He will embark on a journey into your secret garden, stopping to study each flower and inhale the scent of your essence until he fills his lungs with your soul.

He will sit on a hidden bench under a tree writing verses and love letters declaring his love. He will idolize you, and bestow upon you qualities and sentiments that will make you the heroine of his heart. You, the impossible maiden, will inspire his prose.

You will be his muse.

Whether you chose him, or he chose you, or the gods chose you for each other, it will not matter, for the heart has about as much control over who it loves as a raindrop has over where it falls.

And he will fall.

Hard.

Under the weight of his secret affections he will endure the purest of pain. He will deliberate for a long time before confessing his affections. He will feel uncertain how to proceed.

It will all be new to him.

Again.

The sweetness and vulnerability of falling in love akin to a sunrise that provides refuge from a lonely night.

He will find you in a crowd of unfamiliar faces. He will search your eyes for salvation from his desires. And your name will rest on his lips; waiting for the tear he will shed when you break his heart.

The chaos and confusion caused by rejection and jealousy will complicate love. You will attempt to dissuade him in an effort to gauge the depth of his emotions. And though he will find it impossible to imagine his world without you, he will adhere to the damnation of his heart.

He will go to hell at your command and struggle with the demons of his desires.

It will never be difficult to persuade a romantic to fall in love. Inextricably, it will never be difficult for him to love you the morning after heartbreak.

“Love?" he smirked "It kills your heart, it steals your soul” ~Obengbia Leyony

Romantic Musings: What Is A Love Letter?

I like to believe that it is a short story between two hearts.

They could be two hearts that beat as one, but where is the fun in that?

Let’s throw in a bit of conflict.

After all, love is like a sword. A blade forged in a fierce flame. A sword, like Excalibur, that may only be held by those with the purest heart. The markings engraved by passion. Stained with the blood of a broke heart.

Broken by what? A long lost love? Unrequited love?

Must we first know what it truly means to love before we can write about it?

Yes and no.

Some would postulate that fiction writing is predicated on creativity, and others would contend that you must write what you know.

Even if most of us merely have an idea about what love is without truly understanding what love means, we all know how heartbreak feels. Don’t we?

Now. You might ask, how can we know heartbreak if we truly don’t understand love.

Well, we all know sadness without knowing heaven, don’t we?

I daresay that most of us have merely caught a glimpse of love. Have savored tiny droplets of devotion in a desert of loneliness that barely quenches our thirst, and imbues our desire for another taste.

We look to the sky, and pray for rain during the dry seasons of our souls.

It is in those valleys of our journey that we reflect on the romances of our lives. When only the moon accompanies us on our voyage, we remember what only the moon witnessed when we loved.

You know what I am referring to, don’t you?

The memory that lingers in the hidden corners of your heart like a ghost that clings to its bond to the living, haunting your dreams in the day, and swimming through your thoughts at night like a silent shadow when you sleep.

How would your love letter read?

What would your story say?

Love is a long story, but it is a story worth telling. It has its pain and joy, its sunny days and storms; and moments like these when you are gone; I don’t know how long the storm will last.

It’s scary to think I might never hold you again, and even though you have departed, I haven’t let you go. I cling to what is left, and willingly relinquish the rest.

I lost myself in you, and to lose you is to lose everything, but the only regret I could ever have in losing it all is to not lose it for love.

In the aftermath of what has occurred, I will wander into the darkness of heartache, and roam through the empty corridors of unrequited love. I shall search for the memory of you that mends my broken heart. I will follow the ghost of your presence that haunts me along an invisible path; where you remain in the shadows, and long for me to find you.

I don’t care if I am left exhausted or incomplete; left with the impression that you took away everything with imperious greed, because you revealed to me the nature of love: an allurement of happiness that I detest and desire, but from which an escape is impervious.

And if all that remains is the memory of you, then that shall suffice, because I will have at least retained possession of the most precious gift of all. Love.

“The frankest and freest and privatest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter...” ~Mark Twain

The Purpose of Death is Life

The dead don't wait for the living. Their journey has already begun.

Have you embarked on your journey?

Are you willing to share it with the world?

For the writer, the answer should be a resounding, "yes!"

When Natalie Goldberg said, "writers live twice," she was correct.

Beyond our experiences, and our moments of reflection, however, are the lives we live within the stories we read and the stories we write.

Through the prism of our perspective, we share our observations with the world. Our stories will be our legacy. Our prose, the fingerprints of our souls, will remain long after we have gone.

People will read our memories and glimpse our philosophies. They will read our romances, and wonder who we truly loved.

We write, because we possess an innate need to share our private thoughts.

We will assume various identities, and reveal our secrets by way of concealed messages. We will divulge our fears, and reach for the stars, and we will often wonder: How will I be remembered?

Our greatest fear is that our story will perish with us.

Perhaps I can only speak for myself, but even George Orwell once postulated that "all writers are vain."

We indulge in our own vanity, as much as we indulge in the vanity of other writers.

What I mean to say is that writers are readers. At least we should be.

Each novel we read is a world where we escape into and lose ourselves. We live that life with the characters created by someone else, exist in that alternate universe of suspended belief, and emerge with a new perspective (or not) as writers.

I have devoted most of this year to reading and revising. And revising. And revising. And revising.

And reading. And reading. And reading. And reading some more.

I love it.

The challenge has been to balance my commitment to my craft with my devotion to my children.

When I have my children for visitation, I dedicate my time to them. I read with them or I read to them. And as much as I would like to read one of the numerous novels I am currently reading, to them, I set those stories aside and journey with my kiddies into the world of Junie B. Jones or Alice in Wonderland.

I work six days in a row with hours that fluctuate from seven in the morning to eleven at night as a police dispatcher. I meet my fiscal responsibilities as I was raised to, and I sacrifice wherever I must to make ends meet.

These are the dealings of fate.

This is a writer's life.

I try to squeeze in as much reading and writing as I can into tiny droplets of time and I do it with great pleasure despite enduring the purest of pain.

I, nor any other writer, can know which day will be the last day we will ever write again. So it is incumbent upon us to embrace the grind. Multi-task and manage our daily obstacles as we embark on our journey to fulfill our dreams.

We must not procrastinate, as we are prone to do, and we must not save our best for another book.

If we are to share our journey with the world, we must do so with unparalleled passion. Regardless of age, vocation, or status, we must do it now and not be discouraged by the drumming of the disenchanted.

Fear not that it is too late...after all, that is why the gods invented death.

Embark on your journey now, and meet the end without regret.

Every book you read, every story your write, every moment you devote to your craft is a step in the right direction.

Don't wait for destiny to find you, because there is only one destiny that awaits us all, and since tomorrow is promised to no one, today is the day that you must live your life.

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so as long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.” – Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451