I wrote about this my first year in college. I have the original on a floppy disk, remember those? However, no device to plug it into to retrieve my writings from back in the day. Whatever I wrote, had my professor intrigued enough to discuss it and other things for over an hour in his office. He was in the middle of writing a book and I thought he maybe extracting research material for it. I wasn’t the only one who thought this, colleagues confirmed the same feelings. But I remember him being captivated and eating up everything I had to say. I wasn’t sure of his motives, but he was intense, his lectures always full of heart. Anyways, my mind keeps thinking about what I wrote. We were to imagine what our future partner would be like; it was only to be about a paragraph or so. I recall an image of my partner reclining on a Sunday morning with one leg hanging off the couch and a toddler tugging on the sweat pant of the dangling leg. The soft vibrational notes from the strumming of his acoustic guitar resonating to the ears of a toddler as soothing as the soft loving words a parent exchanges with their child. Burst of song would start the bending of the little one’s knees and eventually the bebopping of his head. Other than a repeated chorus, no words were necessary to burst open our hearts and allow the radiance to permeate into its fragrances and to fill the room with so much blissful resonance to make the clouds dissipate and the piercing rays to finally greet us at the windowsill. This was my vision, a nest full of mellifluous melody and an abundance of love and sunlight to keep us grounded, charged and never to stray at least not too far away from our true selves. While I bumped into a partner with solemn musical talent, this scene never played out. Instead, distractions and projections along with a cyclical flow of anger, blame, resentment, deceit, denial, falsification, justification and manipulation that never transmuted through the beauty of music. Zoning out into screens, there always a yearning for white noise, and background mumbles from soul-starving figures reading from a script, a world of promiscuity, a ceaseless stream of excessively violent and aggressive movies and gaming…simply lost into realms of the darkness. Never to hear the soft whispers of our soul calling, I hadn’t a chance of my vision coming to light. There was no connection. Merely routines and the spasmodic pattern playing out over and over as my insides crumbled.   

Love isn’t expecting the other to do what you expect him to be doing, Lordy knows you can’t change the directional path of another unless that person makes the choice, but love is to set the person free, to figure things out to allow a chance for that person to reground and find the zest in their heart to do it all over again another way. Love is the allowance of true freedom within himself to see the destruction and trust that there is a lesson allowed to make a choice. I twirled the heirloom ring around my finger as I sat in a windowless office packed with books and stacks of papers as Professor Eddy remarked how beautiful it was. He asked if he could see it up close, it was a stunning design and the most beautiful gem I had ever seen. Gifted to me by a beloved aunt when I hit my teens, I treasured it and wore it every single day until it was time to bequeath it back to her daughter when it fit her grown-up finger. Who knows, I may read a novel that describes this adored ring that once twinkled on my finger, or perhaps I will see that partner strumming his guitar belting out from his heart how truly free he feels right there on my couch.