I was in my 47^th year when the scales fell from my eyes for the first time and I opened them to see love.  I thought I knew love, but I had been wrong for all those years.

I had been married and thought that was love.  I was wrong about that.  After my divorce, I had had a series of involvements and had been smitten by a few of them.  These too I mistook for love.

This was something new and wondrous.  The world was now a different place.  I was Tristan after drinking the magic potion.  I love that metaphor.  The potion suggests that love comes from some magical source outside of us, and is thus beyond our power to control.  It was, at any rate, beyond my power to control.  And it still is, 19 years later.

But there is a snag.  She is married and we have not seen each other for nearly 30 years.  And for the past 19 years I have carried a torch and lived with my regret.

We had seen each other for about two years on an on-again, off-again basis. Then she was a tumescent 27 and I was a hormone ravaged 34.  She was a singer-songwriter and pianist who has written music for jazz and ballad singers whose names you would recognize.  We were lovers. 

I will tell you about two memories that now consume me

One lazy summer afternoon, after making love, she sat on the edge of my bed and wept.  I asked why.  “This is all we do,” she said.  I tried weakly to console her.  She was opening her heart to me; I did not open mine to her.  If only I had.  She wasn’t exactly right, I thought.  We did many things together besides make love.  But our times together always ended in lovemaking.  I was hard on the rebound after my divorce and my myopia was acute.

One day she called to tell me she was going to Europe.  A year or so later I got a call from her.  She was back in California.  Could we have lunch, she asked.  We met for lunch and she told me she had gone to Europe with a man.  A man she planned to marry.  I told her I was happy for her.  It was easy to say because I was now seeing someone else, one of those women by whom I mentioned I had been smitten.  After lunch we shared a hug and busses on the cheek, and went our separate ways.  It was the last time I saw her.  It was 1983.  I remember her dress, her hair, her almond shaped eyes, her scent that day.

The woman I was seeing at the time of that meeting was the last of the women whom I thought I loved.  But when the moment of truth arrived after seeing each other for eight years, I was unable to commit.  It was not because of the famous male stereotype of fear.  It was because I knew that I was not truly in love.  It was the last serious relationship I had.  It was 1991.

My ensuing ruminations on my inability to commit was the event that caused the scales to fall from my eyes.  That's when I found love.  And I have remained in love for all of these last 19 years.

I know her married name, and where she lives.  If I had the courage, I would make an attempt at being a homewrecker.  I haven’t found that courage yet.  I pray that someday I will.  Until then, I am cursed with the affliction of unfulfilled love.

                          Pablo Neruda