The older brother, who was then at DePauw University for English Lit (my future major), guffawed at me. “They invented this stuff you consider cliché, Melissa,” he said, chastising me. And he was right. In my 17 year old, short-sided, I-know-everything-view, I hadn’t considered that someone needed to write “My luve is like a red, red rose, / That’s newly sprung in June” on paper for the first time; it was not transcribed by divine intervention.
Then last week, I was listening to a mixed CD made by my friend Joe. While listening to the CD, I noticed that I had stopped listening to the new songs on the disc (this was my ninth or tenth iteration of the CD) and instead, I was listening to the song choices and the way the CD was arranged. Inspired, I wrote Joe an e-mail: “Your musical selection indicates that you are a hopeless romantic.”
Joe wrote back, “Can we smell our own?”
It seems that I need people to point out to me (despite my stubborn nature) that I am a hopeless romantic. Apparently, all of the literature and poetry I read over the years has sponged up my brain and turned me, who is coated in sarcastic pessimism, into a sobbing, sappy, sentimental romantic.
Secretly, I long to be swept off my feet, to be wined and dined, to be given flowers on the first date, to be chased, to have poetry written to me, to be a muse like Dante’s Beatrice.
Yet, when I run through my mental Dewey Decimal System of memorized poems and cataloged quotes, one motif is present over and over again: bittersweet.
Love found and lost.
A heart mended only to be broken again.
Hellos. Goodbyes.
Memories. Waiting. Disappointment. Frustration.
In my hopelessness, in my romanticism, is there an element of realism? My bittersweet side certainly seems to think that love is attainable but losable. Or is this just part of the human experience?
One of my favorite quotes represents my ideology of love perfectly: “Loving you was a kind
of Chinese guerilla war” (“The Last Dynasty,” Stanley Kunitz). Humans have this instinct to think that they should be happy, that another person should make them experience happiness, that happiness is attainable in another. When in fact, as my friend Stanley writes, in love, we find a type of warfare. And, as the saying goes, all is fair in love and war.
And as sick to my stomach as it makes me feel, I truly do believe that romance is not dead, just masked in cynicism and protective coral reef barriers of past actions.
And since I like to make declarations every once in a while to prove that it can be so, I choose romance, with a little bit of bittersweet chocolate, a bottle of wine, a poem or song or both, and a little bit of warfare if even it is just a game of tug-of-war.
• "A Single Serving" appears second and fourth Mondays every month, exclusively in Lumino Magazine. E-mail Melissa at m.koss@yahoo.com. Photo of Melissa by Anne Coloso.
