Often times, life offers up more questions than answers. Today, I would like to pose the question:

What if you were meant to love an unlimited amount, but it's the world that makes you choose?

I have been toiling with this idea ever since reading a poem by Adrienne Rich titled "For the Dead"

I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer

The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself

I have always wondered about the left-over
energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped

or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting long after midnight

As I read the third stanza, I was suffocated all at once by a rush of assorted emotions associated with previous and current loves, even the loves that were to come.

Do we have an unlimited of love? Is there always "left-over energy?" Do our hearts contain an abundance of love? Will they ever run out of water?


We will never know for certain. For humans sake, I hope it is the second and I will spend my lifetime fighting to live by this truth.


Here's my attempt to explain it:

 Subconscious curiosity: yearning

Wondering, dreaming of possibilities.

It must have been the awkward space between

          Which our minds hoped to fill.