In my lifetime, I have learned that 25% of all living things, plants included, on this planet are beetles, so that if you’re in the supermarket checkout line and there are four people in front of you, statistically speaking, one of them is a beetle.
I have discovered that “pulchritudinous” is the English word for beauty beyond compare, yet when most people receive the compliment, they flinch away out of misunderstanding.
I have learned that misunderstanding is too often the cause of the loss of something that is too precious to be squandered on a mistake,
And I’ve gained the knowledge that time, flickering, flittering, fleeting time is a commonplace miracle that is often wasted on waiting for Spring, so that oh-so-many winter snowflakes get lost into a sea of snowbanks, never to be seen, or witnessed, or loved.
I have learned that people too, are snowflakes.
I have learned that some jellyfish can reach lengths of over 100 feet in size and have been known to kill people by enveloping them with their gargantuan tentacles,
And that hearts, sometimes, oftentimes, have tentacles of their own.
I’ve realized that learning to ride a bike is hard, and that learning to swim is even harder, but that learning to love is simplicity in itself. It’s when it comes to learning to BE LOVED that the problems occur.
I’ve learned that a canary takes 30 mini-breaths per second, that one person can take your breath away a thousand times in the same second, and that once it’s gone, it never really comes back.
I have determined that advice born from passion should be LAW, that love should never be a secret and that rain can wash away all the pain in the world if you simply let it.
Yet for most of my life, I did not know that fruit flies only live for 22 hours, and only much later did I understand that 22 hours and a hundred years, both the duration of a lifetime, can just as easily be wasted if we don’t start living RIGHT NOW, for you must be the pianist, NOT the piano. Your heart is the only compass you need.
But the dawning of the realization that people will have drastically different ideas of what personal hygiene should be was most shocking,
And I even read somewhere that Victorian women ate arsenic in order to obtain a nice ashen skin tone. What I realized on my own, however, is that this is not the only reason why a mirror is a person’s worst enemy.
I have learned that in 16th century Naples, public kissing earned a couple the death penalty, and that I would have risked it just to have your lips against mine, even if only for a moment.
Much too late, I understood that it is permissible to love, even if it’s only ever alone, but that castles in the air need foundations lest they crumble and crush the real world they had once observed impudently from above.
After so many years, I now know that at the end of the day, I would set the world on fire just to make you see the light,
That love really can give a person wings,
And that only a fool will bother to wonder why this is so.
I have learned that NOTHING is more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shore no matter how many times is it sent away, and that you are my shore, my oasis, my harbour, my haven.
In spite of all this, however, I have not learned how to make you love me. I must have missed that day in school, or not seen the flyers everyone else seems to have read, for I am truly alone, with my heart broken in all possible meanings of the word. And perhaps it’s because I’ve misunderstood, or because between the biking and the swimming I never got around to learning how to be loved, or because you are a canary with no time to have your breath taken away, but I think it’s because people are snowflakes, and when I fell, it was into a snowbank of others, so pulchritudinous that I was left all alone, or should I say surrounded, here in my sea of desires, frozen-over.
But here I shall lie, and here I shall wait, because I need you, because I love you, because I have not yet learned how to stop, because I want to give you wings and teach you how to fly, because I want to take advantage of that fact that I don’t live in 16th century Naples, and because even though, like the shore, you have sent me away, I cannot help but to drift back and crash into you once more, even if only to break my heart over you again, and again, and again.
It’s funny; I guess I just never learn.
