A Distance More Than Miles

Now I can still taste you, smell you, feel your touch. Bastard. How can I love someone that does not love me completely, wholly, fully. Yet I do. Why? I am not stupid and I don't have youth to blame now, nor even past experience. I have no excuse. I have never been naiive or sheltered, I know what is what in this life, or I thought I did. Until now. Don't get me wrong, I've fallen before, several times in my thirty odd summers, so it's not as if you were the first. Still with all my knowledge, all my experiences, still I fell, and hard. It's painful when you fall like that. Beautiful and glorious and deep and very, very painful.

I told you I didn't want to fall in love and you said 'why not? It is such a beautiful door to open.'

It is. A rainbow of a door, that gives you new life and hope.

Tonight I hate you. But that is only possible because I love you too much. What happened? How did it happen? I know you so well, as you do me. Is that normal after such a short time? And I suppose 'time' is questionable because I have spent at least eight hours a day with you since the day we met.

Now I'm leaving for a week and I wonder how that will be for both of us.

We have everything and nothing. Together we can have it all. Apart? Well. There is a situation. A distance that is more than miles, that is wider than an ocean, that can never be bridged. Despite the fact that I know you love me and would do anything in your power to help me, it's not enough. What I want from you, you can never give, and that daily becomes more and more difficult and soon it will swallow me without trace. A beautiful rainbow of a door that one day soon, despite the pain, will have to be closed. I know that I will have to close it, for you never will. 'A beautiful door to open' for whom? There is always blackness on the other side of my door. Always the knowledge that you will leave me for another. And you do. Every single night, when you go home to your wife.

Rocks and Diamonds

It was nothing like Shirley Valentine at all. For one I didn't speak to walls or rocks, and for another I wasn't married & didn't even have a boyfriend waiting in the wings ready to rush after in hot pursuit, until I eventually succumbed and fell gratefully into his arms swearing undying love. No. I just made the decision to move here to Sorrento because I fell in love. Not with a waiter I might add, just the place. The beautiful coastline, the weather, the food, the lifestyle. Idyllic and inspiring, especially in winter when it is blissfully quiet, devoid of tourists and tour companies. Then I have to admit it is tempting to talk to rocks and walls. Easier too than trying to get my head round Southern Italian mentality, which on the surface appears much the same as our own, but after actually living here for a year, I realise that I may as well be on another planet. Almost everything I held to believe, all my attitudes, responses, my very foundations have had to go as I learn again from scratch.

At first I fought to change attitudes, to justify myself, but all I did after eight months was exhaust myself without even making as much as a ripple in the calm waters of Sorrentine mentality.