This strangest autumn, mellow and acute...

It's strange how certain things stick to your mind. I was thinking of a recent exchange I had with someone I know and it struck me as to how little we know of ourselves and others...The friend, who was mourning a private loss told me, "You didn't understand it's about loss and sorrow, not something I can romanticise or write poetry about" and I was left speechless for lack of any explanation I could furnish.

The measure of love is not loss. Or if you look at it inversely, loss does not quantify love. I have sometimes wondered what it is about love that makes it so difficult to give up something or somebody. That sinking feeling in the pit of my gut telling me things will never be the same again...and the hope lurking in some pitless abyss for a dawn of redemption...

I don't revere love, but I treasure it, just as the way I treasure sorrow. Not because sorrow and loss feed my romanticism, but because I am scared of their potential. What you know is what you have got. I know love in the way it touches my life every possible way, but I am also aware of sorrow because I fear the power of loss...There is no romance in it, no scope of a sympathetic chorus. I am scared, selfishly so. For what is yours today might be mine some other day. That is all.

In the meantime A has come back and I can't tell you the exquisite relief in knowing that we'll come home to each other, every evening, for the time being at least. There's so much to do right now that we hardly have time to talk to each other. There are pressing things on hand, PIL's failing health, things going wrong at the workplace--too many things that tire us out before we eventually get some time together. But just catching his eye over the dinner table, or the quick hug in the kitchen or the strong shoulder to lean on when I am totally spent mean so much that all the stress and the duress don't matter anymore. I love the us that we are...I hope we stay this way...