Michael's Corner

And so another February 14th is among us. As history illustrates, February 14th, in the year 1929, did not go so swimmingly for old Bugsy Moran. Never let it be said that Al Capone was not a man without a sense of irony. However, the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre, which took place in Lincoln Park, Chicago, was not the first Valentine’s Day massacre. Long before organized crime syndicates fought for regional supremacy—one such incident saw Capone’s men, disguised as police officers, gun down Moran’s men—Saint Valentine, or Valentinus, was executed by the Roman Emperor Claudius. Claudius had enacted a ban on marriages. The Roman emperor’s rationale was that men without wives and children made better soldiers. Valentinus, a clergyman and hopeless romantic, defied Claudius and continued to perform wedding ceremonies in secret. It cost him his head. Thus, the martyred clergyman became a symbol of love. It should also be noted that Saint Valentine was the patron saint of beekeepers. I’m not sure why beekeepers needed a patron saint, but who am I to question it?

To commemorate Valentine’s Day, I would like to present two offerings. The first is a love letter I wrote to my Kathy for our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. The second is an essay that encapsulates the first ten months of what has proved a remarkable love journey.

LOVE POURS FROM HER CHALICE

By

Michael DeStefano

What is love but a wonder countless poets have sought to express—an esoteric abstraction binding human consciousness with an unbroken thread, weaving an ever-broadening tapestry. Or is there more to an exploration we all seek and crave?

     In his lifetime, a man will encounter more women than he can ever take the time to know intimately. Has he the predilection to love any one of them? Is our shared humanity an ineffaceable mechanism for falling in love arbitrarily? Are those we love placed in our path by a power occupying a province beyond our earthly grasp, or is love as random as a fluttering snowflake settling onto a blade of grass?  

     I do not profess to know even a single mystery in a universe of many wonders. The following is all that my mortal mind allows me to grasp, and for it, I am eternally thankful: Love of My Life, I was born to adore you, serve you, worship you, keep you safe, bring you happiness, or die trying.

     We have known love in the past. Each time, the thrust of its lure failed when colliding with the burden of responsibility. Whenever the world of wearing influences finds its way to our bosom, we overcome it, strengthen, and ascend to a higher plateau. Our bond has never frayed or faltered; it has and shall remain unbreakable, for neither of us was a snowflake whose fluttery descent brought them to a blade of grass. Love of My Life, through raging storms to bursts of sunshine, we soared, for we were destined to guide each other in this lifetime. And thus, I pray that I am as nourishing to your soul as you have so steadfastly been to mine.  

     Love of My Life, our love endures; its ethos traverses the idyllic and all that is possible; its breadth transcends the poet and the pragmatist, the spiritual and the intellectual; it stops time and soars to lofty dominions; its journey clings to commitment as the soul does immortality. Until death do us part and beyond, I shall move, see, breathe, rejoice, and love under the wings of the angel the world has gifted me. I now and shall forever drink from your chalice.

THE LOVERS

By

Michael DeStefano

To know love exists marks the essence of hope. To experience romantic love is the pinnacle of splendor. To create it is magical.

     The world is chock-full of wonders meant to dazzle the hopeful and receptive. On an impulse, a woman enters a room, and a man spirals through the universe, grazes the other end of infinity, and bounds back to where he stood.

     The respective journeys our aspiring lovers blazed began six years and six thousand miles apart—improbable treks that coursed an ever-madding chasm they dared tread—yet, somehow, their paths intersected. Who was he before that point in time? Who was she?

     Her softness, her angelic loveliness, like an impromptu gust of wind, whooshed through him, its thrust as palpable as a surging tempest. When its obliquity finally settled, nothing stood where it once was, where he remembered it to be. Decades had vanished, and to where he cared naught but prayed a moment that brought to bear arresting profundity was shared equally. And thus, it was for the angel and her suitor.

They parted reluctantly, did these aspirants of love, with the near-breathless entreaty that they would meet again, and thus hope, like never before, hovered on a nearby horizon above an earthly plane where only naked souls dare tread. He took the vision of her to his bed that night, her scent still redolent in his nostrils. He was not lustful in his hours of reverie. His musings were those of a man enlightened to the notion that he would spend all his days gazing up at her from his knees, his view beyond enviable; no aspect of fauna, flora, or light in the sky could stir his soul as she could; she was the rarest of the rare, an echo of faith that traversed a madding world and rolled up on his shore.

     Time passed; love flourished as quickly as they imagined it would. Splendorous nights and days filled with novelty and discovery, each folding seamlessly into the next, had followed in harmony. Words lilted like songs and thoughts like dreams as they played and frolicked in enchanted lands and uncharted waters, ascending to heights and diving to depths no mortal lovers ever reached, or so their boundless imaginations let them believe. They crossed the threshold to a sought-after pinnacle, a longed-for domain, and drew into their lungs its rarified ether. How sweet it tasted, and warmly it kissed their glowing bodies, tangled in a lover’s embrace.

     Peace, serenity, and passion swirled in a garden of earthly delights these heavenly creatures had created from love. But then the air grew squalid and effluvial; the sudden perversion spread rapidly, its breadth ubiquitous and consuming. It frightened the lovers; it screamed to them the perils of surrender and the thrust of power they had over one another. The pinnacle to which they had ascended stretched to a dizzying height, a dominion where thrill often capitulates to fear. Swiftly, what prevailed was the notion that each could shatter the other’s heart into more pieces than they could count; thus, chariness reigned where love once played, and each cast blame upon the other for the ambient miasma that held them captive.   

     Like the finest silk tapestry, the perfection they wove was both artful and brilliant. It fooled the lovers into forgetting how incomplete they once were; ergo, they took turns assailing their love with defiance, willfully denying that each had hopelessly enslaved the other’s heart. And how trenchant they were in using the love each had brought to bear to fortify themselves and then claim strength and independence. It hastened a season of discontent that saw them as passionate lovers by night and antagonists by day, glorifying past loves and diminishing the richness of their fantastic beginning. No more would she wilt in his presence as when he embodied an ocean into which she could dive with no thought or care of drowning. No more would he crawl to her with the fervent cry, “A mere piece of you is worth more than any woman in totality.”  

     And thus, the lovers acquitted themselves as titans frothing with desires no one specific need meet; they clashed as would tyrants and children did these fools in love. Still, the season of discontent endured, levying its charges upon their resolve and once glorious sensations. But soon, summer’s sultriness would succumb to buoyant autumnal crispness. The lovers would cool with the cooling ether, agreeing to meet in early winter. A bleak, dark December night would determine their fate; they were to meet at a favorite haunt aptly named Strawberry Jam before the clock struck midnight. “If you are prepared to love me forever, then show. If not, don’t go anywhere near the place,” was the edict upon which they had agreed.

     The risk was unimaginable, as each had envisioned themselves standing alone on a lonely midnight sidewalk, shivering in the bitter cold as the fraught seconds became minutes and minutes an hour of inexorable gloom.  

     As the autumn evening passed, a pensive quiet prevailed, each anticipating the empty weeks ahead. Their goodbye would wait until the morning. He lay awake watching her sleep; her face, in repose, was angelic and made him weep. Before long, he lay down his head and slept beneath her watchful gaze, blurred with tears.

     The lovers woke at dawn to autumn leaves clustered here and there; the scent of a new season in full thrust ushered in evocations of hope. A morning that saw perfunctory movements edging toward the agreed-upon resolution slowed and grew chary; the lovers sensed a thrust of dread assailing them that they had squandered the magic that flowered their glorious conception. And now the lovers stood face to face, their gazes reflecting how, not long ago, they personified love at its most resplendent. Defiance came seeping from every pore of their bodies and swiftly dispersed into the ether; their lungs were finally free of the squalidness they had long endured. They uttered nary a word; their bodies expressed every offering, speaking, voluminously, a language neither had ever heard yet recognized with unmistakable clarity. Their tangled, impassioned forms echoed the cries: You are boundless love and unleashed fury, the thrust of passion and unintended cruelty, the apogee of joy and wistfulness of pathos, the blissfulness of serenity and paradigm of chaos. You are all that there is— every raging storm and calm sea that has ever happened, and I am helpless but to drink it all in because I am nothing without you!

     Their lovemaking spiraled to a pinnacle where passion and atonement collide, creating uncommon sensations. “Take me. Please love me,” were the near-breathless entreaties she uttered. He met her at the deepest depths of vulnerability with arms that would never let her go. They surrendered everything they were to one another and prayed their bounties would transcend fulfillment on the way to perfection.

     No sooner than their ravaged bodies untangled, he fell at her feet, and she collapsed onto his back. They quaked with passion and shed tears of shame for allowing the sin of pride to taint their once-pristine waters. Never again would either deny the other was the missing piece that completed them. Never again would she know a day deprived of his worship or him seeking her approval, nor would there come a day free of her diving into his ocean to explore further the depths of vulnerability. They are and shall always remain the most splendid of lovers, their souls irrevocably intertwined upon their earthly quest for eternity.