Romantic Musings: Fires of Friendship and Love

Friendship is to love what the wick is to the candle.

Once passion is sparked it will dance, and breathe, and illuminate even the darkest corners of your heart.

Desire will liquefy beneath it, like wax. Shedding slow meaningful tears that will solidify over time.

Like a statue that has immortalized an image of beauty, your memory will capture the image of that candle we refer to as first love.

Friendship is to love what wood is to the fireplace.

It will flicker to life with laughter. Moving along the bark tentatively as it gauges a new level of trust.

You will prod it with romantic expressions, moving the wood to encourage the flame. Gradually, your earnest intentions will ignite a fire in the hearth of your heart.

The heat will radiate across the darkness of your tomorrow. Reach you, caress you, and comfort you as it casts dancing shadows against your soul.

You will add more wood as you fall in love. You will long for autumn evenings to revel in the luminous glow of your predilection for inner peace.

In the cold, loneliness of long winter nights you will snuggle with your partner and see your future in the frenzy of flames.

Friendship is to love what coals are to the fire.

From the shadows of your heart’s desire, will emerge the fate of unrequited love.

It could be a love you never finished or a love that never started.

But it will burn.

A kiss you never shared or a touch you never felt. It will haunt you. It will echo in the deepest valleys of your heart and follow the breeze along the meadows of your memories.

Real or imagined, you will remember this love that never was.

It is the truest lie that writers will ever tell and lovers will never know.

A longing so intense you will shield yourself from its glow.

This love of which I speak will break your heart and cause your soul to shudder, for this love burns in the dark forest of your fantasies.

It will never have been intended, not that love ever is, but some fires are sparked with the intention of being extinguished and others will rage beyond control.

No circle of stones will contain it, and no measure of precaution will protect you from its will.

The desire will be fierce. The flames will flutter like the wings of a butterfly. It will be the secret you won’t know how to keep, for it will be your eyes that shall betray you, the windows into a tortured soul.

Perhaps it’s only logical that damnation is equated to an eternal inferno.

Paradise lost when you lose yourself to the throes of passions that cannot be, that must not be, lest we lose the desire to find it.

This is the curse of the writer.

Our first love is the poem. Short and sweet like a candle, its kiss and scent are meant to awaken our hearts.

The short story is our second love. Deeper and stronger like a fireplace, but it is never meant to last.

The novel is our true love. The coals of creativity burn, and long to reveal our dreams and our nightmares. We struggle with revealing the secret, agonizing over every word, every scene…the beginning, and the end. The characters that we remember, and the people we never met…the lovers we never loved.

Maya Angelou once said, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

This holds true for the writer that chooses to pursue passion along the path blazed by broken heart. Each rejection, each revision is a reminder of our imperfections. We will long to tell the story as eloquently as we can. We will long to love without conditions, and live the tale that will always be remembered as one of the greatest love stories, ever.

The friendship is reading. The writing is love.

“Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.” ~Bruce Lee