I have decided: Romance and Realism are NOT a compatible blend.
This constitutional mix invariably results in an intolerable state of indigestion and acid reflux which, over time, scars the insides and debilitates the swallow reflex. I can tell you this: I found this out via private overindulgence in those all-you-can-eat buffets of the heart. In a failed attempt to constrain my ravaging emotional hunger with fantastical, heroic and epic narratives of love impossible and unattainable, I have roused the ancient lover’s muse within me with sometimes wild, miscalculated abandon. I have pursued my want of relational mystery in a multitude of “fateful destinies” and have suffered a venusian insomnia which has, at crucial times, compromised the simple joys of mundane life in all it's comfort-food subtly and grounded glory. I have since come to the (tentative) conclusion that:
Romance is just another intangible, extended sense-perception which inextricably alters reality like a drug and leaves a smudged blur over the reasoning faculties.
Therefore: Romance is not real.
Sometimes I court the myriad fascinations of my physical senses in a rather hedonistic manner: I do, at times secretly devour sultry and erotic public-domain offerings. The musty scent discreetly tucked away in a circus of bus-ride pheromones, doing intoxicating twirls in my anonymous head. Clandestine. Unattached. Romance's fleeting apparition when the moon frosts her silvery luna-light over watery quivers of ocean and pale skin. Longing. Unrequited. A musical voice playing hide and seek with my playful curiosity, enchanting me with visions of ancient gypsy caravans and entwining kundalini snakes. Seductive. Cosmic. It's in capoeira hodas and graceful fingertips with tans, strong jawlines and guitar harmonics. It's in the richly dark eyes of a perplexing and enigmatic Latino and in the lucid memories I hold precious and dear.
Yet ultimately romance’s allure is something of a biochemical elixir, one I elaborately concoct like a crazed chemist with bad hair and then throw a cocktail pajama party whenever I need a mental PMS vacation. Romance is like an invisible satellite dish on my head doing a 5436-channel frenzy of possibility. It's a multi-syllabic run-on sentence suffused with my own liberated fancies, with my secret, inner projections and over-dramatized wishes for a love still yet to come true. Yes, much like a good novel (one I’ve written, unpublished, myself) this kind of romance describes endless and naked scenarios of the imagination in so hypnotizing and seductive a manner I willing plunge head-first into a rippling sidewalk mirage, splaying my foolery for all to conclude:she is not the first, nor will she be the last.
Romance is a satiny, melt-in-your-mouth chocolate fondue for skinny dipping erogenous zones, its decadent indulgence a deeper need to satiate that lurking, undefined, something "else” we so crave. To make tangible that which has ultimately alluded poet, thespian, musician and the like for centuries, despite notable, valiant attempts to elevate it's sensual affections beyond the average reach.
Romance is a wily and crafty impostor which masks that "something" neglected or ignored and parades it around as the "too good to be true", as the "wishes (finally) granted", as the lucky fortune found in the pot of gold at the end of our own personal rainbow. It is a want of an emotional, spiritual gratification, misdirected. It is something I have spent (too) much time dancing with in my (sky-bound) head, chasing it into the erratic course of nature like an invisible butterfly-one I describe so vividly to myself that I can almost watch it kiss noses with the shedding buttercups and wilting daisies of my myriad unfulfilled hopes for epic romance.
I indulge romantic notions when reality is something I’d rather redefine and fictionalize. And being a creative, imaginative visionary in a world more crudely carved while O.D.-ing on la-la-land filled bon-bons is like choosing to blind perfectly lucid eyes by watching fuzzy television in the dark. My no-name brand of wallet-size romance is a renegade harlequin gone bad-ass, a juicy lucid-dream in virtual technicolour after too many episodes of channel five in black and white.
Oh, the dry soils of inertia and boredom, of restlessness and barren landscapes spanning life's unbearable disappointments and persistent cravings for a love exalted (not to mention the perils of aging skin, aching bones and long-term monogamy) These are all fertile breeding grounds for the wild weed of distraction to root itself, with or without the promise of bearing the edible fruit of eden, that very life-sustaining fruit so intoxicating, yet still so forbidden and taboo.
I will birth the ideal romance within my own dreaming deep down in the stratas of my colourful powerheart.....just seed that little kernel of magic right down in this here richrich earth of mine and I’ll water you and sun you and protect you and sing to you... I will conjure you alive, conjure and immortalize us both in the radiance of the impossible, in the expansive alternate realities of bliss and joy and endless rumi-esque poetry lest you retreat into darker, more isolate soils without first branching, without first reaching, multi-limbed for the embrace of my loving vastness………
Romance shlo-mo-mance.
I so intensely want romance to be of my own crafting, to infuse it with things I have no right calling mystery because its linear names are far too verbal, a language of limits. I will flood my escapist notions, these romantic distractions with oceans of abandoned sensuality, sun it with fires so bold and impassioned as to create entirely new and animated universes of lust, love and blissful levitation. I will want it to be mine-all mine. And yours too (of course we can share).
So fierce this distorted possession of desire that any real semblance of true romance will die of saturation before it is even born, making a poetic assassin out of yet another hopeless romantic.
Yes, this one is for you.
