This one will always be for you...

WITHOUT YOU
I recall an impression…while initial, something severely stronger than a glance or a touch. As each moment passed, hours becoming days, beginning to border on a year, the image was now concrete – it was you…always you, from the moment I saw your face. I have loved others; I have cared for many, but somehow in this snapshot of time, you have pierced my soul like no other. Poetry, so often allowing me to express myself when all other forms of communication fail me, seems rather insignificant and unintelligible as I hold it up to the light of my passion for you, but it is what I have to offer you now:

You are the rays of sun that dance on the water at sunset on the river. You are the fire that snaps and sparks in the roaring fireplace in the mountains on a frigid day. You are laughter from a bus of grade school students on their way to see the safari for the first time. You are stars and diamonds and strawberries and stained glass and a multitude of brightly colored roses along a white picket fence in the south of France. You are, all that I have wished for. You are…my love.

But alas…all that I feel for you, like an enormous wave breaking on the sand, washes back from whence it came and the reality comes clear – the picture in my mind is only that – a fantasy of images that I created for us without your approval; without your consent. And now I am beside myself with grief. I have lost you before I ever won you. Not that you were a prize or a raffle or a trip for two to an exotic port (although I have dreamt of us together in such a place). I could never think of you so trivially. And yet, while my heart should be full, as we have shared so many stories; laughed about our lives and come to call one another friend – indeed I should be grateful…I am somehow destroyed. As if the half-full glass I have struggled to envision for my life has a hole in the bottom, which can not be repaired – eternally empty. I am forced to ponder age old questions that have haunted greater minds than mine and stumped the geniuses of our age. Why do I love you so? Why can’t you see what I see; feel what I feel? Why do you incapacitate me and flood my senses with emotions that possess me? Why has the journey led me to this moment if we two can not be one? I do not have the power to force your feelings and yet I can not eliminate my own. I am left, in this shadow of a dream, standing alone, compelled to watch you from a distance as you flourish and find your way…without me.