Where Do You Find Love?

I look at you from over the aged pages of my favorite novel. I see you there smiling while looking at your computer screen. Your eyes are crinkling at the corners and twinkling that bright blue that I have grown to love and associate as wholly you. Your pale blue eyes and sharp chiseled face imprinted on my soul forever. Even when I cannot find you, I know those eyes will be with me always.

I continue to watch you just over the pages of my book. I don’t want to disturb you. I don’t want to distract you, so I make sure to look down at my book every so often, so my burning gaze doesn’t penetrate your soul. You have a certain sense I have noticed. Maybe it’s Love. Maybe it’s something else, but I have noticed that if I look at you for too long, you always seem to notice and then you’ll look at me too. I have to be careful. I just want to look at you today and not have you return my gaze.

We’ve been together a very long time, you and I. You, the one who fell in love with me instantly. And I the one who needed some coaxing and time to process what my soul needed. I know now it needs you, but even after all this time, I am still amazed at your ability to enrapture me.

I look at my book again, I skim over a couple of sentences. I turn the page. I hear you peck away at your keyboard. Good. You are undisturbed so far. I glance at my feet pressed firmly in your lap. You are sitting in that hard-backed chair typing away at some article furiously, while I am sitting in a much comfier red chair with a blanket draped over me and Wuthering Heights in my hands. My socked feet are in your lap and your hands bounce between the keys on the keyboard and my feet. The fireplace is roaring behind us. This is how we normally are together. The familiarity of it all comforts and relaxes me. Thus, my mind wanders and drifts. After all, I have read this novel a hundred times. I can quote nearly all the dialogue between the two main characters. I know what pages I am looking for. I mean I have them dog-eared, sticky noted, and circled, but I also know them all by heart.

I look at the rings on your fingers and then I look at mine. My engagement ring glowing a bright green in the sunlight. I smile and play with the ring for a bit rolling it around my finger. Then I begin to think about the lazy days like today where we get to just sit around and enjoy each other's company. You are writing and I am reading and we are somehow both completely content at this moment. It might be a short lived moment. Duty will call soon and we’ll have to start cleaning and preparing to cook and then get ready to have a restful sleep in order to be productive tomorrow morning, but it is in this moment of restfulness and contentment that I wonder: is this where Love lies?

That intangible emotion that somehow simultaneously dilutes and intensifies the senses. An emotion that compels and drives us as much as it can abruptly stop and hinder us. I look up at your face and a sudden wave of emotion crashes all around me and I am forced to look at my book for a long period of time while I try to process all that I can possibly be feeling while you continue your work. You continue typing and the soft clacking of the keyboard lulls me back to a relaxed state. I love you so much. I cannot explain it. The emotion itself is too complicated and too powerful to understand. I very often feel like Tristan and you are the Isolde that gave me a love potion forcing me to fall in love with you.

I know you didn’t force me to love you though. You did so in an even more calculated way. You loved me so wholly and completely that I fell in love with all that is you. Your loyalty and bravery at continuing your pursuit of me has made me love you and I don’t believe it is an emotion that I can ever be persuaded out of at this point.

And yet, sometimes I wish I could look at Love. I wish I could touch and feel her. If only she would manifest herself in a more tangible way then I feel like I could somehow gauge my dependency on these moments with you. If I could only peel back the layers of my heart and soul and see: ”Ah yes, I will love you for at least twenty more years, but then my love will fade.” Then I would be able to prepare myself for a time without you somehow. Or even more terrifying, to find out that you will only be able to love me for ten or fifteen years more! I cannot fathom how my soul would shatter knowing you could fall out of love with me.

I shake my head. I flip a page of my book. I bite my lip and turn my head to look outside at the grass and trees. I hear you clicking the mouse and roughly hitting the backspace key. I slowly start to calm down. All this Love is too much. All this emotion is too much. Unfortunately, there is and never will be perhaps, a way to calculate Love. I feel like King Lear asking you, Cordelia, to quantify your love for me. I sense your eyebrows scrunching and your brain trying to process this question if I was to be as foolish as King Lear and ask this of you. I hear you internally scream: “But my love is so vast that I cannot measure it!!” And perhaps, like Cordelia, you cannot be persuaded to try and quantify something that cannot be expressed by mere words.

And thus, I must resolve myself to this fact. Love is unmeasurable. She is too vast, and too complicated, and enigmatic to comprehend or understand fully. Her weight permeates the air constantly, and yet, she cannot show herself. I feel myself unable to breathe in her presence and overwhelmed because I have no idea how to combat that, which I cannot see! I flick my eyes back to you. You are saving a document. My stomach growls. I have only read one line of my book and that was just now: “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same....” I close the book. I set it down next to me. You dart your eyes over at me and smile.

”Hungry?” You ask with beaming eyes. I am guessing you heard the obnoxious Stomach who cares little for Love and only beseeches tangible substances.

“Starving.” I answer honestly and set my feet out of your lap and onto the floor to begrudgingly get up and become acquainted with all the simple struggles of basic human need.