To my Valentine

Blame it on the mellow season or the inevitability of my approaching flight from the confines of this place, on the propitious date that shall be upon us in a matter of days or on the bounteous moon that is shining with more than its usual fervor tonight. But in indicting them for the genesis of this letter , you will be gravely mistaken. For the instigation of this communique lies deeper in the mists of time, the mists that part deferentially under the intensity of your radiance so very often, yet so much darker, dreary and desolate for the rarity with which your countenance has been kind enough to exhilarate those who pine for that one glimpse of the face, the face that, a millennium ago, could have set sail a thousand ships. I do not profess to be an authority on romantic magniloquence but I could, in that first fleeting meeting of the eyes, Oh those eyes!, I could understand the helplessness that Byron envisaged when he wrote those immortal lines:

Thus much and more, and yet thou lov'st me not,

And never wilt, Love dwells not in our will

Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lot

To strongly, wrongly, vainly, love thee still.

And ever since that one propinquitous moment, it has been impossible to restrain the flights of imagination, extraordinarily vivid in all their brilliance during promenades through the copper-hued drizzle of dried leaves, transmuting into something so surreal when you breeze in silently as I make my way past the crossroads, the lonely forlorn figure trudging through the white clouds hanging from the tranquil boughs above. And even as I walk ,engaged as I am, in the oft repeated and severely practiced conversations, all confessing to the irreversible enchantment , some professing undying love , the fraction that is still grounded in physical reality bitterly yearns for that elusive next encounter that providence has planned for us. The impulsive thought of forcing its hands has, not infrequently, crept up on the bleak, tempestuous horizon but as often slinks back just as it seems that the sun will finally come out. The perennial winter that I find myself in, though, is not ungrateful in this state of limbo, for the ethereal promise manifested in you. And you seem to be an enigma too pure and divine to desecrate. Better to pay unilateral obeisance to the flawlessness of the deity than to drag her into the dirt of human existence as a mortal being.

And so have I fallen , as is said colloquially, truly madly deeply in love. Not with you. The pedestal on which you are is as forbidding as the figure in repose on it is alluring. But an idea of you.

And this letter is addressed to that idea.

Yours ensorcelled,

DJ