Memories of love spark dreams of comfort

I won't pretend to know what happened last night.
I decided to play the 8 hour Sleep by Max Richter, that by his own admission,  is a piece intended to be appreciated while sleeping.
I know that I had a couple of dreams that were very soothing.
One was about power sockets that needed replacement.
Another was about soothing displays of affection towards me. They were inspired by a love lived not so long ago and yet still yearned. I cannot say if the music just reflected a wish that seems to be impossible to take place in the current time line, but somehow felt as comfortable as the overwhelming nature of a perfect moment shared by two people who love each other without conditions, without rules, just fulfilling a desired to be accepted by the only person that makes sense.
The dream was not sensual, but it had the kindness of a kiss invented to express recognition of existence. On that moment, the memory of that kiss, felt to me as if I was the most significant person to the one that was kissing me. It was not a glorification, but tender, cared.
How the words fail  me now. How the  poet in me is still trapped in that dream, and refuses to put in to words the intensity of a love shared on a dream.
Sadly, this is the realm of reality, and I have no substance of experience to realize the nature of that feeling.
All I know is that is inspired by a moment once shared, and now is but a wishful thinking of that which reality brings me no further. The uniqueness of the purest kiss, conceived by the fairest of those who ever lived, can only be relived in this dreamers dream, for the motionless train can no longer carry the love of two, when one is burden by some other sort of love.
Of my lover I can only say this.
I hope that she may find in this reality a love so passionate and pure, as the one I lived on my memories last night as was performed by the cast of players of my dreams.
Selfishly, I shameless confess that I wish nothing more than to be the lover that gives and receives the building blocks of memories not yet formed, but forever yearned.
Dammit I love you
The emptiness lingers still as you are no where to be found, by your will alone.
May your will keep you out of harms way and remind you of endearing memories of my love for you, so that you may wake up in a dream fulfilled by your loving memories of me.

Natasha e José

Natasha and José are a couple that celebrated the combined age of 100.
This happened today.
They did it in style.
They prepared their favourite dishes.
They gather friends, family and me.
To this day I had never seen José and I saw Natasha once at a birthday party.
But today, I was immersed in this rather unusual celebration, by one of her friends, someone who has become quite a remarkable friend as of late.
I saw people saying poetry, performing mini sketches, interviewing the birthday boy and girl, singing songs, mimeing in group, wearing ballons on the head. It was an homage, not just to Natasha and José but also to the people who mean the most to them. I saw a true celebration of love.
It was almost anthropological my interaction with these dozens of people as I was an appointed outsider that was cordially allowed to witness one of the most impressive displays of love I have seen in recent years.
Fortunately, I am blessed to have a family that organize special events to celebrate important dates within the family, that do not fall short in anyway to express love.
We write songs, record video sketches, say poetic toasts indulging the honouree.
I have very few words to say about what I saw today, but I just wanted to leave this record as a reminder of this unique party that I was blessed to attend.

With all my love

How I wish I could have found strength in me to invoke all the love this universe has ever known and channel it to you. How grand could it have been to hold you close just one more time, not just for my enjoyment but for ours. How I would have loved to vanquish your fears and dreads and cast light towards a better path, a shared path, one that was meant for our love to grow. How come did I lose the battle of the eternal flame of passion,  when I was so  willing to join you from sun to sun in the pursuit of our inner voices, so that they might sing in a lovely tune that would in turn inspire millions to follow suit over their chants of love. How far would you be willing to go, if the softest kiss could have lingered as an immortal memory, to keep your weary self confident when in doubt, to fill you with joy when crossing the miserable rivers of unwanted sadness, to cure you from a venom that was never meant for you, but alas has found a tragic way to be carried on, from generation to generation, and was supposed to be over by the sheer simplicity of love.
How long would you have kept me company if the love I have for you was somehow the love you would have rivaled with the love you had for me. Would you kept going beyond the erroneous belief that things were forever lost, due to darkness that grew from within?
Would you have found the simplest spark to light up a new universe with in my heart? And would you, if you had the persistence to keep me by your side,  please tell me, how would you persuade me to believe in us one more time? And do you think, that in this timeline, what was valid for me once, could in turn be used to sway you back, to show you that we are truly bounded by love.
If only, I could spread the magic of the comfort of love and build new bridges for a better tomorrow, may be then you would burn the bridges that lead you through shallow ways
Know this, even though our paths are no longer meant to be drawn together, I respect this existence and I hope that you are indeed well and I thank you for all that you left behind, a unique set of memories of an unique passionate love.

What we leave behind

I caught this title from the ending of the Deep Space Nine series.
I liked the idea that we always leave something behind.
Maybe in everyday of our lives, we are constantly choosing what we take and what we leave.
Granted that everyday, life seems more like a string of choices that can be rewritten if we just go back and redo a bit of the past in the continuous present. Today, if I call a friend, I am choosing to grant attention to that one person in particular, leaving a series of other possible encounters behind. But tomorrow, I may call another and thus instill the illusion that I am not leaving anything behind, but instead make conscious choices by will, keeping day by day what matters close.
A poem, a music, a film, a play, a painting, all these expressions of art are continuously undergoing selection by what stays and what moves one. Every now and again we revisit some old favourites, to keep them fresh in our memory.
Alas, with living entities we often are faced with the painstaking fact that some things that are left behind, do stay beyond our reach. We often invoke them by memory but that is a fickle trick, one tapestry that almost immediately loses grasp of the original moment. For a fainting moment it allows us to recall the highlights of a particular event, but without actually experience the full spectrum of nuances that the whole extract of life had right there and then.

Personally, there are many things I miss.
I do dwell on recollections to preserve a fresh sense that what I have left behind is not so far gone that I cannot somehow feel it as being some echo from yesterday. My memories will eventually fade away to oblivion as my faculties start withering and ultimately, when death leaves my body and memory behind there will be nothing left.

There is a constant hope, some comfort notion of an afterlife existence, albeit unproven, whether by reincarnation, spiritual evolution, transmutation, you name it... Religions of different sorts hold its believers hoping for a life after death, where somehow we can reencounter all of those that has left us behind so long ago.
There is no proof that it may be so. For now, the marks we leave, each of our living days til we die, are in fact all that we can be certain that we actually are leaving something behind. Hopefully those that survive us will carry on the tale of our existence for generations to come. Plus, if the deeds he made in life were worthy, those too will carry on.

I leave this entry, one of many, behind. Hopefully, this text will outlast me in the physical world and might hold some meaning for someone I will leave behind.    

State of Life

Hello dear ones!
I am not sure if I still have any readers (or if I ever had), but I will keep writing just in case I am the only reader.

Nothing extra to say. I am still alive, despite the emotional earthquakes.
Still here.
Still alive.

Friendship

Should we dare to say whatever we think to our friends?
What if it is a matter of opinion about an issue they did not even asked but concerns them?

I sometimes wonder how far should I go to tell a friend to go colm monkeys out in the jungle rather than tell me their views on specific items that affect me dearly. Maybe I am not ready to engage them on their turf of opinions, specifically if they have to do with situations that I am not dealing well.

Having said that, what gives me the right so vomit ideas towards closest friends, with the arrogance that my view on something that was not asked for, called for, is the right on, and worse, that they need to know it... because for some reason, my view of the world is the right one.
Well its not.
But neither is theirs.
We just all pretty much agree on a set of ground rules to make the world a semi-understandable place, when in reality is a very complexed place.

Oh well... I am not in peace with some of my friends now. But I need to be in peace with myself first.
Still, I do not feel troubled, I just do not have patience anymore to bullshit, even if it comes from my most endearing friends. They will not stop being my friends, I am just not going to take it anymore.

Hopefully

Does money buy love?

The other day I was driving home late at night and I decided to fill the silence within the car with whatever sounds the regular programing of the national broadcast radio was offering to its listeners. To my surprise an interview to a famous portuguese comedian was on and I was drawned to his specific answers that stayed in my mind and led me to put these words here.
Still, its not without surprise for me that this comedian showed such an intense view on subjects like suicide, happiness, depression, love, wealth.
At one point the interviewer mentioned a quote by somebody the comedian knew that read more or less something like this:

"Money can buy true love"

The comedian agreed and offered some stories to reveal how money can sustain the endearing part of a growing relationship and by opposition, how the lack of it can blur, with the greyish and sour nature of a succesion of poor days, the purest of love, by occuping the clarity feeling with the dirtyness of perception.
He implied this by sharing a story of two couples he knew on opposite situations, one that was the typical woman that loved the comfort that the money of her lover could buy and eventually realized that the money was only a means and that the man was such muc more, and a poor couple that had two glorious weeks in wealth and that when they returned to their meager condition they could not linger in the passion of that fabulous fortnight.

I could not help but reliving some of my own experiences on this field, and oddly enough I found that I agreed with the proposition. For sure, money does not buy happiness or love, but it is a powerful catalyst in sustaining the nature that leads to it.
Which leaves me with the question. If money does play a role in buying love, does it come a time where the love is pure and true to withstand the lack of it?
Think about this for a moment.
Imagine that you had lived for two weeks in a glorious richful setting that helped you live a fantasy that for all ends and purposes can be mistaken by true love; and when your days in "paradise" are over and you and your love interest return to the bland reality of everyday life and then find out that what was fueling the love was not the relation but the setting - would that relationship last if the setting lasted?

Some friends have frequently suggested  that some relationships fail because what drives love is not the true nature of the person but the idea we make of the individual helped by the circumstances that are being lived while making the acquaintance that lead to intense passionate affair - but is it love?

The proposition of the comedian was that if you live in the beautiful setting for a prolonged period of time you eventually pass the point of no return and you become head over heels.
However it was no clear in his interview that if a change of scenario took place would the loving couple change its view?
In some cases, crises provoked by outside parties can affect the stability of the relationship. Is it fair to blame the rupture on these sources of disruption? Or is it more honest to see the feeble nature of the couple, that at first sight of trouble, found that the exit was the solution?
Is true love something easy that flows or is it something hard, that constantly resists the harshness of time?

Being a professional single for the past 40 years, with some ponctual moments of affection in my relations, I do wonder about the merits behind successful relationships. My parents for instance. They started their relationship in a harsh scenario. My mom was a modest young woman that was raised on a rural village in struggling conditions that work hard to find a break in the big city; while my father had already 4 children from a previous marriage that ended badly, mainly because of the emotional instability he had due to the unpleasant effects of an overseas war with the colonies.
But still, they had me out of wedlock, they managed through odd times find the delicate balance that allowed them to be together for almost four decades. The eventually got married after 12 years of relationship, and my mom took care of my father until he died at age of 84.

The comedian also said in his interview that life is more like a wagnerian opera that mainly feels like a long dull four hours with ponctual moments of sublime beauty and awe.
My parents life had this simultide as so many other lives in the modern times.
But still the money or the lack of it does play a part in the way we perceive the way we want to feel the tune of our lives.