Their love, at length, was lost— for such is the fate of youth; it ends, ends with sorrow and shame and suffering, yet with insolvent hope. Perhaps they loved for weeks, perhaps months, perhaps so long as a year, but no further. However long they loved, fiction does not permit us to know.
But although love was lost to the unfathomable seas of time, they did not die with it, for it was in letting loose their love that they lived on to linger in old affections and leap into the new course. It was in drowning that they breathed their first strong breaths. It was in loving that they learned never to be afraid of losing their depth.
And in years to come, they would think of the boyish love they had shared— see a van and be reminded, read a poem and remember, catch in the corner of their eye a doppelgänger and be choked up with nostalgia for youth's love. Adult love was hard. Loving in that boyhood had been simple as breath, as the coming of life in spring. How cherished that love was, always.
Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.
YOU ARE READING
Les Noyades
RomanceRumi lives amidst the cluttered pile of his eclectic father's academic papers, the half-forgotten son of an exhausted Cambridge professor. There is nothing of interest in the town- nothing, that is, until their door is opened to one of his father's...
