Romance

I haven't been a fan of romance movies since I was around 14 years old watching The Notebook. I've always thought since then that most romance movies were designed only to make women feel bad about themselves and their own boring existences and, for the most part, that's what they do to many of us. We watch, we cry, we laugh and then we look around and wonder why the hell no one is flying us to Paris or showering us with flowers every day. These movies can end up giving us unrealistic expectations about love, about romance. Expectations that no man can usually meet in the same way that we can't be devastatingly beautiful and quick-witted 24/7. I have found though that if you can go in to one of these movies knowing that life isn't a fairy-tale that they can actually be quite enjoyable to watch. I'd still more often pick Hard Boiled over a romance flick any day of the week but, for some reason, tonight, while other people were in bed or out with friends I decided to turn on some silly 2001 romantic comedy. Sitting in the living room on a make-shift bed of blankets and pillows and sipping hot tea through a straw I lasted the entire movie and as embarrassing as it may be, I liked it.

But, just because real life romance is rarely anything like the romance we see in movies does not mean that the romance happening every single day around us isn't as beautiful or amazing. We just need to look closer to see it. Sometimes, we even take it for granted.

Going Back to Bed

BY J. D. MCCLATCHY

Up early, trying to muffle

the sounds of small tasks,

grinding, pouring, riffling

through yesterday’s attacks

or market slump, then changing

my mind—what matter the rush

to the waiting room or the ring

of some later dubious excuse?—

having decided to return to bed

and finding you curled in the sheet,

a dream fluttering your eyelids,

still unfallen, still asleep,

I thought of the old pilgrim

when, among the fixed stars

in paradise, he sees Adam

suddenly, the first man, there

in a flame that hides his body,

and when it moves to speak,

what is inside seems not free,

not happy, but huge and weak,

like an animal in a sack.

Who had captured him?

What did he want to say?

I lay down beside you again,

not knowing if I’d stay,

not knowing where I’d been.

Dreams

Out of the real world we try to cultivate new worlds for ourselves to live. Worlds where bad things never happen. It seems to work sometimes for a while but, our dreams are always there to eventually remind us of the truths that we are trying to forget.

A bad dream is like a snap back to reality.

Arise, Go Down

Li-Young Lee

It wasn't the bright hems of the Lord's skirts,

that brushed my face and I opened my eyes

to see from a cleft in rock His backside;

it's a wasp perched on my left cheek. I keep

my eyes closed and stand perfectly still

in the garden till it leaves me alone,

not to contemplate how this century

ends and the next begins with no one

I know having seen God, but to wonder

why I get through most days unscathed, though I

live in a time when it might be otherwise,

and I grow more fatherless each day.

For years now I have come to conclusions

without my father's help, discovering

on my own what I know, what I don't know,

and seeing how one cancels the other.

I've become a scholar of cancellations.

Here, I stand among my father's roses

and see that what punctures outnumbers what

consoles, the cruel and the tender never

make peace, though one climbs, though one descends

petal by petal to the hidden ground

no one owns. I see that which is taken

away by violence or persuasion.

The rose announces on earth the kingdom

of gravity. A bird cancels it.

My eyelids cancel the bird. Anything

might cancel my eyes: distance, time, war.

My father said, Never take both your eyes

off of the world, before he rocked me.

All night we waited for the knock

that would have signaled, All clear, come now;

It would have meant escape; it never came

I didn't make the world I leave you with,

he said, and then, being poor, he left me

only this world, in which there is always

a family waiting in terror

before they're rended, this world wherein a man

might arise, go down, and walk along a path

and pause and bow to roses, roses

his father raised, and admire them, for one moment

unable, thank God, to see in each and

every flower the world cancelling itself.