Entry 7 - On Love, In All Its Sadness <Date Illegible>

Pre-dawn is my favorite time of day. I love the darkness, the way the blues shade into each other, pale blue-green bleeds into light sapphire bleeding into midnight blue, a blue that reminds one of fairies, like in Arthurian legend. Fey that could trap you in their halls for eternity. Deep cobalt. I love the way the stars sprinkle into that blue, tiny pinpricks dotting the sky, the way a crescent moon bends like a bow, Artemis/Diana shooting her arrows into the universe. I would walk there. I remember the story of Eolus, King of the Winds. It was said that Eolus and his wife were madly in love, so deep, so strong they had never left each others’ sides. One day, news came from the west that the King was needed to rally the armies of his kingdom and come to the aid of his ally. The Queen begged her husband to take her with him, but he could not bear the thought of her coming to harm. The queen begged harder, having had terrible dreams and forebodings of a catastrophe about to befall her love. But the king wouldn’t change his mind. So off he sailed following his winds to the west. The queen waited. Days, then weeks passed with no word until at last a messenger came with news that the king’s ship had sunk. In her despair, the queen hurled herself off a cliff. The gods, impressed by the love and devotion between the two, turned them both into birds and cast them up into the stars so that all the world could see what true love was. Strange that love should grieve so much in what should be joyous—most love stories are so sad.

Romeo and Juliet: Killed themselves. Sun and Shadow: Sunsinger and shadowdancer spent hundreds of years meeting only in twilight. Loving for an instant only to be torn away again. And then giving up all chance of happiness to save another. All of the Greek tragedies. Twelfth Night: a woman desperately in love with her lord - to reveal herself would risk death and exile. So much grief. They say that love springs from compassion. A heart colder and harder than any block of Arctic ice. Plato believed that once man and woman were perfect — each a whole part of the other — the perfect circle of yin and yang. Somehow, those perfect beings were split apart and now each half-person searches the earth for her missing half. Maybe that’s why we date—every non-half we meet shares traits with our other self and we wish so desperately it was them.