Modern Romanticism

He stands. With a beating heart that hopes to bloom, again, he stands, until he finds himself sinking with that heart. Down to earth, bringing ear to soil, attempting to find an echo in drowned scenery. His tears have poured from such storms hanging like tattered curtains above his head. His fingers have trembled, matching the appearance of surrounding twigs that stretch from naked autumn branches.

He says, “Why would fate be this cruel to me? How could my faith come to be this weakened?” Spilling these unanswerable questions, because they are among those that come with grief’s unwelcomed, but sometimes unavoidable, entrance.

Grief will invite itself through the door of someone’s heart, taking over what a person called their home. They had, before grief invaded it, adorned such a dwelling, their heart, in all the colors of love’s beautiful naivety. Who can answer what other lives, other lips, won’t answer? None of them, because love is that perspective on a life that had been cherished, that had been possessed, and no one besides the lover to the beloved comprehends what they had felt. But now with grief encircling this one man’s mind, comprehension is lacking due to a single thing, being death, a thing just as powerful as love, and just as misunderstood as love.

Golden naivety. The splendor inside it bring in all that bliss. In it, we are walking away from all that is temporary. We go blind to life’s limited moments. Now we have this man, finding himself lost in a maze where all walls present another question to ask and to never have answered. All walls present a framed portrait where the unfamiliar faces ask those questions. Those faces have a smile. Those faces taunt this man.

An echo doesn’t come, but his heart keeps going. For what? For life. Though, what good is life if kept in the dark? What good is its light if it doesn’t illuminate anything? What should it illuminate? For this man’s case, it should illuminate further footsteps.

When he pulls himself further apart from the grave where he kneels, he will see a road. A road that is lit with one more lamppost’s brightness upon each needed step. A road that has darkness on each side, motivating him to continue ever onward.

When he sees that his life can be brought forward still with the preciousness to the love he once held in his arms of flesh and blood, he’ll recognize that he’s lost nothing. For if he were to forget, he will no longer love. Though, should he always remember, his love remains eternal.

To take his memories forward on a road towards a rising sun will let him understand that he had been in pain only because of what he wanted back. Only because of what he could no longer hold in those arms of flesh and blood, he had been in pain due to what he couldn’t change.

To another thing he cannot change, being what he remembers, whatever about it brings a smile instead of more tears will provide him a token of peace.