Unsigned Love Letters: The Lion and the Grasshopper…

Dearest Love,

 

What are you to me?

Tormentor? Betrayer? Anguish, as well as relief from it?  You are all of that, yes.  

 

Friend? Lover? Partner? Joy and despair. Unrelenting hope and broken dreams. You are all that, too, yes.

But what am I to you? Nothing? Just a plaything? Someone you indulge at whims?  If yes, then why do you call to me? Why say my name with so much longing? Why look out for me, protect me? Why jerk me away, only to reach for me time and again?

 

God, why can’t you just… not exist? But what will I do if you don’t? 

 

I often wonder, what connection is this, between you and me? What kind of a bond, one that makes me feel both, alive and dead, captured yet free, powerful but weak at the same time? What could ever come off it, become of it? And if nothing will, then why do I turn to you?  

 

Do you even see, understand how wide the chasm between us is? It is wider than the sky and the earth, for even they touch at the horizon. It is larger than the difference in day and night, for even they rendezvous at twilight. It is deeper than the gulf between the moon and the ocean, for they too, shook hands in the moonlight. 

 

You see, ours isn’t the divide of peasant and royalty, or divinity and mortal. This is a pit. An unbridgeable, impregnable, uncrushable pit of credence, like one that exists between a grasshopper and a lion. One a king and the other, not even a subject. He lives in caves she can barely comprehend. She survives in the grass he tramples every day. 

 

She can see only him.  He can barely see her… 

 

When I was a child, Mum told me that wishes were an enigma by default. They yearned to be fulfilled, but seldom came true. And some were so dangerous, so deadly that they should never be uttered out loud, much less prayed for because some wishes, dreams were nightmares cloaked in the moonlight. Like the beguiling darkness floating beneath a candlewick.

Translucent but never gone. 

Nothing but bloody mere illusions. And we both know it doesn’t bode well to dwell on illusions.

 

Tell me, then, why do I dwell on you?

 

Beguiled but not lost…