Love makes me present

by DRM

He returned to the other point of view — oppo­site to that of his love and of his jeal­ousy, to which he resorted at times by a sort of men­tal equity, and in order to make allowance for dif­fer­ent even­tu­al­i­ties — from which he tried to form a fresh judg­ment of Odette, based on the sup­po­si­tion that he had never been in love with her, that she was to him just a woman like other women, that her life had not been (when­ever he him­self was not present) dif­fer­ent, a tex­ture woven in secret apart from him, and warped against him.

Mar­cel Proust, Swann’s Way

Once I could under­stand this and now I can’t.

For a long time, I wanted to be in love and in look­ing forced mean­ing and import into places they had no busi­ness being. My heart was like a big, tired dog that kept flop­ping down in ridicu­lous and incon­ve­nient places.

Those times I thought I was in love, I strug­gled with time, imag­in­ing the past and the future, vacat­ing the present. Like Proust says: “apart from him, and warped against him.”

I’m describ­ing shad­ows now, things that I knew but can’t clearly recall.

Love gives you the present. It invites you to be here. It pulls at you when you daw­dle, it picks at you when you wan­der, it draws you down to the very foun­da­tion of your soul.

Love takes us out of the clouds and roots us deeply in the ground.

I’ve stood shoul­der to shoul­der with T. for a long time now. From the very begin­ning, I couldn’t remem­ber what had come before. The begin­ning is like yes­ter­day and the future is right now. Every time I look at her I find some­thing new. The nat­ural world emanates from her. She is how the cen­ter holds.

There is no time apart, there is no fab­ric to rend, no hand­i­work to unravel. In our love, there’s the deep loam, the morn­ing sun, the lyric day and the thick pos­ter­ity of roots that are wound together, that draw up the earth’s water from a com­mon source of won­der to fuel the bril­liant green of the canopy above.