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Whisper on the Wind • Colin Todhunter She is everywhere, yet she is nowhere. She has gone

She is here. I know that she is. I can feel her presence. I can touch her. I can smell her. She haunts this place. She is woven into the fabric of the building. I can still recall her voice, her laughter, her smile. I call her name. It whispers on the wind across five thousand miles. I blow a kiss and it transcends time and place to fall upon her lips. She lives; she breathes; she is.

She is everywhere, yet she is nowhere. She has gone. It is all in my mind. Just a haunting memory of what once was and will never be again. She is lost to me. I cannot feel her. I cannot smell her. I cannot touch her. She is lost forever. She was once a stranger in my future and now a memory in my past.

She is not like bricks and mortar. She is not woven into the fabric of the building. I no longer hear her voice. And when I call her name it does not whisper on the wind. It only rebounds back to me from the four walls of this room, reminding me of emptiness and solitude. And when I blow a kiss, it does not transcend time and space to fall upon her lips. It is all wishful thinking. She is a feeling I try to recapture, but dying so fast.

Does she ever think of me? How does she think of me? And if she ever reads my words again, will she be reminded of my voice, my laughter, my smile? Some people are easily remembered and others, easily forgotten. Will she forget to remember me or deliberately remember to try to forget?

Love is... forever. Love is... always being together. A hundred tired romantic clichés. Romantic love is a virtuous ideal. But who is truly capable of it? Who is capable of sacrificing one's life for the person they profess to love? Making the ultimate sacrifice. The urge for self preservation may be stronger. Words are meaningless without action. Empty rhetoric that sounds good until put to the test.

"I love you" - I want you to be the foundation for my existence? I want you to love me. I do not want to force you to love me or to love me for all of the wrong reasons. I want to capture your free will and for you to love me as I love you. A contradiction in terms? I want you - but you have to come to me because you want to. I have you - but only because you let me have you.

"I love you" - well perhaps - but I can't really tell. Maybe it was something I ate earlier that has caused a temporary chemical imbalance in my brain. Or maybe I do love you - until I have to put it to the test. Is that good enough? I pledge my heart to you, with certain opt-outs, clauses and conditions. All I ask is that you love me unconditionally and forever. Am I being selfish? But I am my "self?" So I guess that I am.
And when my tears fell after you left, were they merely salty discharge brought about by a temporary chemical imbalance in the brain?

No! They were tears of passion. And it was not the result of some dietary condition that caused me to be physiologically attracted to you. I did not need an aphrodisiac where you were concerned. It was simply you. You caused it. I'm not in love with an empty room, bricks and mortar or a memory. I'm in love with you. I already had the foundation to my existence before you came along. You just built on top of it and made it beautiful, made it glow. No clauses, opt-outs or conditions. No empty rhetoric. I will love you unconditionally until the day I die.

© Colin Todhunter November 2003
colin_todhunter@yahoo.co.uk

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