(reminiscing of a past love)
A beautiful girl. I miss her, I guess. But she and I were never meant to be. She was in between boyfriends and too pretty to go without. I was there like a number in a bakery. She pulled the ticket, glanced at it, and waited to exchange me for some loaf of bread or cake or pie or feeling that she was beautiful. But I gave her the slip. Came right out of her hands before she could claim the prize and I bet you, I bet you a million dollars, she doesn't remember the number. She'll just pull another ticket, glance at it, and wait for them to call out her number. She won't remember the things I said and won't realize I had never said them to another girl. She'd heard them before and it all ran together like bad poetry. You could see it in her eyes when I talked to her. You could hear it in the way she said thank you when I complimented her dress or the color of her eyes.
It's funny how you think you need something but you really don't. I mean I remember feeling like if I didn't have this girl I was going to die. But I am not dead, and I feel fine, and I think half the time when I like some girl I am really looking for some kind of redemption, some kind of feeling that I matter or am valuable or am needed, and I don't think there is a problem with that, but it just makes you realize how much we use each other sometimes.
I heard once that real love doesn't ask what is in it for me; it just gives unconditionally. It just tries to take the weight out of somebody else's pack, lesson his load, and if it get reciprocated, that's great, but that isn't what you did it for. It makes me wonder if real love, not the crap that we trade in the street, but real love, longtime, old-couple love, is another metaphor. I mean, I was thinking about it the other day and I couldn't think of a purpose for love in terms of Darwinian mechanisms. It seems like there is a reason for sex, for lust and all of that, but what about love? How does love, like beauty and light, help the Darwinian process? And I wondered if love itself, the real thing, the Lyle Lovett kind, wasn't another metaphor for God.
Don Miller
from "Through Painted Deserts"
-note, this is his story, not my recollection of a past love.
