Love

What is love.
Poets, philosopher, preachers and writers have waxed lyrical and pondered over that question as I have too.
 
I feel like a thief in the night, taking love, stealing the joy and the passion only to disappear into the light of day to write my stories and my poetry.
 
I know it isn’t that simple and I know I’m not that simple or shallow. I know love for me is enduring, faithful, strong, thoughtful and kind as much as I know love is fleeting, fickle, transient, thoughtless and callous.
 
I know I am all those things and more,
 
What I know of love is that I love to be in love, I love the excitement, expectation, joy and the headiness of that moment or perhaps only an hour. It is this element of love that conflicts with all the other things it means to be in love.
 
Love is meeting a woman on a bus as it drives on into the night, and through a few short hours we talk and look into each other’s eyes and I am in love. Then in a moment the intensity of that love it changes into passion as my hand reaches inside her blouse and I fondle her breasts, our lips meet and we kiss with the flavor of passion exploding in my brain.
 
Her city comes up and I am desperate to see here again but she said I can’t stop over on my way back, the neighbors would see and talk. We say goodbye.
 
The loss of love plummets from this heady mix of feelings in my brain and sinks like a stone into my heart with a weight that is almost too much to bear.
 
She wakes her two little children on the other seat and steps out into the darkness at 2am in the morning.
 
I watch her gather her two sleepy little children up as my eyes wander over her body, her hair and face, those lips that I just kissed and the breasts that I had just fondled. For the first time I could see her still supple form, the slight round of her stomach and attractive slender hips.
 
I was in love, but it slipped away into the night until all I could see was a shadow and then just a memory.
 
But I had loved and been loved.