I never met you, knew you, or had your love but then I did. The image of the girl who would walk up to me in life, as if it were some railway station and laugh, smile and warm your heart in my embrace faded slowly from my hopes.
That image of your soft brown hair and loving eyes and cosy coat keeping you all warm, and with that scarf of yours peeping from your collar, and those brown shoes you loved, because your dad had bought them never materialised and so I made do with adding tales of disaster to a life apparently lived to amuse those more caring of themselves than I.
I dreamed of our conversations, and the way you’d smile when I did something silly, and how you’d know me like no other and make each moment with you like a prayer. I looked for you in places when young: confident that soon our paths would cross in some gallery or long since vanished bookshop and then less frequently because the hope you’d match your step with mine faded with time and advancing years.
Now you are old as I am old, and on a path uncrossed with mine, subject to compromises I also made and marriages built on the fear of being alone.
You would not love me now, raddled as I am by disappointment, and choices sculpted out of desperation rather than good judgement: the victim of my own chaotic search for perfection, rummaging through careers, and eating romance as if it where a chocolate, wasting my innocence on the fruitless quest to find you and build some idyll: always looking for the perfect moment.
Now, with my last sip of innocence, I dwell on my growing sense of obsolescence, part of a world disengaging from its rhythms in the blind search for some improvement, sliding towards an unwritten future
My goodness that was a strong piece to wake up to. It’s sad and lovely.
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obsolescence. what we are all afraid of, as we slip slowly from this life. beautiful piece –
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Poignant indeed!
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The one that got away…forever. Spledid muse, as ever.
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Sounds quite poetic!
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I think that, for those who have an idealistic perception of love, this feeling never disappears: the concept of a ‘perfect love’ is one that we are taught from an early age, and I feel that, as a result, many of us hold this as a goal. Whether we accept this as unrealistic or not is, I suppose, coloured by our personal experiences. With this story uou have captured this perfectly, Peter.
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Beautifully written, Peter.
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I like the chocolate romance and the fruitless quest 🙂
Sx
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…..and eating romance as if it where a chocolate*****
I LIKE))) xx
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Pingback: Life Without You by Peter Wells | Sue Vincent's Daily Echo
I know the world thinks I’m obsolete, but frankly, I think our WORLD is obsolete … not to mention on the wrong track, heading to nowhere on a hot third rail. YOU are FINE.
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I love this piece of writing. It’s beautiful.
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Thank very much for this lovely comment
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A life spent, lost to what might of been. Too late the realization that the here and now was missed.
A beautiful and poignant post!
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Couldn’t agree more. Thank you very much for commentating 🙂
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Such a pity and all too true people wander into such space. As always, the journeys you send us on leave us contemplating the life depicted matched against our own outlook.
Technology might render us obsolete, but I fear the degradation of commitment to things like democracy means we have never been needed as much as now.
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Even more tragic, perhaps; to have met her and loved her, and then to have let her down. And to spend the rest of a life knowing…
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Beautiful. It brought this to mind:
You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don’t even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me — the far-off, deeply-felt
landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and
unsuspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods–
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house– , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,–
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and,
startled, gave back my too-sudden image.
Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening…
Rainer Maria Rilke
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