mantisphiles

Wrote this a while back, just found it and thought it still works, still has truth………..

Never cared much for opera.  Still don’t. But the training was classical and everyone told me I had the voice for it.  Until the day I was told I would never really make it at the Met.  I had this tell tale jaw wobble.   “Bummer” since I really wanted to sing on Broadway, but I processed the tunes, none really sticking.  Until I met Tosca.

I lived for art, I lived for love.

I thought it made us bullet proof, pun not intended.  Love.  Love deep and profound.  Love preventing the ugliness of life from making inroads.  My rod and my staff, love.  Love explained everything, made sense of everything, bright lined the work and decisions of life.  Love.  Beauty.  Art.

Love of beauty and art we had in spades. Museums, Merchant Ivory films, Miles Davis, mist lifting from a farm field in autumn, a small backwater town on a sleepy summer day.

Like Tosca, I sacrificed.  There were things more important than dancing and friends and Broadway shows.  There was love, and there were no sacrifices.  None that mattered.  I stopped lifting my voice to heaven and put my shoulder to the wheel.  There were milestones to catch.

Our engine caught fire, eating mileage, gaining ground.  We were moving, moving towards that bright shiny ring, just ahead.

I lived for love.

Clear now, what is missed is love.  Love cloaked, enveloped, made us whole.  The feeling what I did mattered, contributed to our universe, contributed to the whole.  We were special.  Protected.  Unique.  To one person I was the universe, and my universe was him.  Worlds without end.

2008, 2009 when I felt the love was gone?  Thought he was leaving me, waited for the shoe.  Then decided it was time to heal myself.  Maybe if I dropped some weight.  Work on me, try harder.  Nothing took. Love was dying and I was fumbling with the CPR

It was the rapine slaughter by the dregs of the world that killed it.  Silent, invisible, deadly.

I miss love.  I miss its palpability in my everyday ordinary.  I miss it in taking out the trash and mowing the grass, singing a song badly but with gusto.  I miss the pull of its invisible threads binding me to a bigger reality.

I have struggled with loss and grief, suicide and alcohol.  So much bottled up, a vintage not for this year, this decade, this world.  And in the end, I lived for love, would have died for love, and still, even now, question whether I actually had it or not.  Question why I cannot follow in the footsteps of my hero, my  Tosca.  Am I too weak, am I too strong, did I not really love?

I have lived for art, I have lived for love.  Lived and lost.