This is a love story

This is a love story.
This means that this is not a happy story.
Nor is it a sad story.
It is a life story.

She marries her high school sweetheart.  They get a home, and settle in.  They paint the baby's room.  The baby is conceived, and born, but never sees a day.  Then the next.  Then the next.
She weeps for them.  All of them.  Her children that never were, but always are.

And life goes on.
This is a love story.

Another mother.  Another place.  Her fourteen year old daughter hooked to wires and machines.  She will not see fifteen.  She will, while distinctly faced with her own imminent mortality, be her mother's strength.  She'll also wonder what it feels like to die.  She wonders what it feels like to kiss.

And life goes on.
This is a love story.

A different man.  Another home.  He holds the hand of the man he loves, as his parents cry, and weep, and rain hate down on them, for being filthy.  For being perverts.  For bringing shame.  They wish he'd never been born.    He holds his hand tighter, knowing it will fuel their hate, but it's where he finds his ability to continue breathing.  Because you see...

This is a love story.
And they are in love.
And life goes on.

They share a cigarette under the moon.  With them, it is always the moon.  They can never be.  It's  complicated.  Isn't it always?  Everything is easy.  Nothing is simple.  He hasn't seen her in years.  He may not see her for more.  But there is this moment.  They are at least granted moments.  They are few.  There are never enough.  There never will be.  There could not possibly be.  So they must learn together, to take each moment.  Each rare chance, and create eternity.  And thus they learned to freeze time.

Every true love story,
must freeze time.
Because, the greatest horror,
and the greatest remedy,
and the only truth...
Life goes on.

She sits in her chair.  The blanket on her lap.  Her wrinkled hands gripping the paperback with torn corners. Her eyes are tired, and she rests them by looking away from the words.  She sees the picture on the wall.  "Goddamn you." she says to the man in the photograph.  The man in the ground.  The man who gave her fifty years, and left her alone for her last.  She misses her children who sometimes visit.  She misses her grandchildren, who send her cards.  She misses everyone who's come and gone, and sometimes come again.  No one she misses more than the old bastard in the photograph.  The conversations they had a thousand times, and she wants nothing more than that same conversation number one thousand and one.

This is a love story.

The high school sweethearts drift apart and away.  He leaves, and she's left to drift upon the rock, with worn out shoes and broken heart.  All is lost, then all is found.  A new day.
A new love.
A new daughter.
A new daugher.
Children, and light and laughter.
Because life went on, and love keeps happening, and the better things really do, on occassion, come to the fighters, and the dreamers.
She is happy.
She is fresh.
And the names of her babies are still, and always, remembered on every tear.

The girl in the bed, with wires and machines, has a visitor.  He tells her of her other friends who haven't come to visit.  The things she's missed in school.  When he looks at her, it is not with pity, or fear, or sadness.  He looks at her as he always has.  With warmth, and kindess, and she knows in her dying heart that she has loved him since they were in elementary school, and through all of her cruelties to him, and his to her, he's been a single constant in her fragile life.  He has to leave.
She gets her kiss.
Although in just a few weeks, she will be in a box...
Right now...
In this moment...
She is on the clouds.

This is a love story.

And the couple under the moon, have frozen time.  Now they are in bed.  Now he's holding her.
Now she's asking...
"What is the first line of our story?".
"He loved her infinitely.".
And now they're dancing.
And now they're laughing.
And now he's holding her beside her car.
And with the goodbye knife she stabs him.

She sits in her chair and smiles at the old fart on the wall.

He holds his hand, they hug, and put the ugly words behind them.  They kiss, and make love.

She's with him.  Posing for the engagement photos.  She looks into his eyes, and feels her yes.

She watches her leave, and knows all the words she should say to keep her from walking out, and doesn't say them.

He stands at his mother's grave, and cannot see through the tears.

She signs the divorce papers.

He signs the marriage license.

They sit outside a bistro sipping coffee in the new city, and after forty years together, he looks into her eyes for the millionth time, and feels his yes.

She sits on her bed, with music in her ears, and dog at her feet, and wonders why she can't just say it.
Just say it.
Just

And all these little love stories
And all these little interludes
And all these little

They dance in the rain.
They kiss in the street.
They watch with pride at graduation.
They weep
They sleep
They hold
They laugh
and cry
and rejoice
and

Freeze time.

And before she drives away.  After the kiss.  After goodbye.  After that final reluctant break of shaking physical contact, but just before she closes the door...

Be love.

Not in love
Not I love

This is a love story.
Which means it is not a happy story
or a sad story.
It is a life story.

Feel your yes.
Steal your kiss.

Be love.
Be loved.
Beloved.