Love, Love, Love

This is a style of writing called free-flow writing where one puts pen to paper (or hand to keyboard) and writes without a pause, allowing everything to simply flow – no grammar, no punctuation, no technicalities, just feelings!

The following piece was written by an ex-partner many years ago. To date, it remains one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I have ever read. When I came across it once more this morning, I felt it needed to be shared so that more people can read and appreciate the beauty of this piece, written in one shot with no thought. Happy reading! 🙂

the devil came and told me on a lonely cold winter night when the wind blew itself into frenzies of icy hopelessness that I could spend this night however I want to but only this freezing night and that tomorrow my soul would be his I asked him for one more night with you not just any other night but like that night when we held hands before getting on a train together a journey I wished had gone on forever and ever on cast iron tracks of love into a darkness that I still can’t forget it was an amazing darkness as you sat there opposite me as the southern plains ran past us but we couldn’t see them because it was dark and anyway all I had eyes for was you and after some blessed time you blushed and told me to look away but I did not I could not for I did not know how long the magic would last and I wanted to lock it up in ancient oakwood treasure chests and bury them on lost islands across silver oceans so no one else would ever find it and in a way no one ever would because that night on a train under orange lights your smile was mine and I was the happiest boy on the whole planet of course the devil did not understand what that night meant to me like he can never hope to understand what rainbows mean to country girls or what the smell of fresh rain on earth means to a farmer in a desert village or what the old seaman with gnarled hands pushing his catamaran out to sea on a misty dawn feels every time he points its snout out to the great waters of the world the devil will never understand that your eyes still even after all these years hold my salvation in them and that your lips hold in them the nectars of the gods and that the memory of the touch of your skin is all I need until the end of days I asked to spend a night like when we went out to dinner to that expensive high-roller restaurant with a live band and when they took requests you asked them to sing shania twain’s you are still the one and that was the first song they sang because who could refuse you ever and when they sang you turned and smiled at me a smile laden with meaning a smile borne of a thousand suns and I knew the song was for me and I never forgot it as we held hands and listened to music timeless and music pure sung for us by two musicians from the continent who looked straight at us and sang in voices that carried in them the romance of the great wars of the west voices that evoked parisian street lights and spanish mysteries and then we looked at each other and it was the most beautiful feeling I would ever know of course the devil can’t understand why I was smiling like an idiot i mean how can he understand what love means the meaninglessness of it and yet its profoundness the narrowness of it and yet its all encompassing glory he’s the devil he has no idea so the last dregs of the dying night just before my soul would be sold to evil forever lost cast away into molten depths of the night I asked to walk with you through the falling yellow leaves of the university paths where the monsoon still keeps our story under a purple umbrella because it could not bear to let us go we could not hold hands then someone would see but it was all good because the yearning to touch each other to feel your fingers in mine to clasp them together to hold you was how I felt what love is what love could be and that was how I first knew that I had fallen deeply irrevocably fatally in love with you and that whatever happened my soul would be yours and this is exactly when the devil understood that he had been tricked and that my soul would never be his and when I stood there smiling in the winter night he looked into my memories and looked at your face and even as he took my soul because a bargain is a bargain he asked me she was worth it wasn’t she and I told him yes more than you ever will know but then I looked into his dark eyes burning with the perpetual red fires of hell and I saw an infinite sadness in black eyelashes drooping under the shadows of centuries of evil and I knew in a flash of chilling heat that astonishingly amazingly he knew he understood he actually did – you had made the devil fall in love with you

I was thinking about writing today the art the beauty and the freedom in it and that was when I thought of this what you’d written all those years ago it seems like a lifetime ago these words that poured themselves onto the page like honey on pancakes like cream on strawberries like roaring water plunging into the depths of the still pond these words they took my breath away the first time I read them I was blown away at your talent your ability to dive into the depths of your mind and face the torment that you otherwise were terrified of looking at I remember feeling so proud so in awe so overwhelmed at this expression all these years later it remains one of the best pieces of writing I have ever read not just for its depth its layers and its complexity but for the soul in it the way you wrote it flowing flowing flowing with the poetry of your mind showed me the beauty of your heart the purity of your love and the sheer goodness that dripped from you during every twist and turn we faced perhaps there never is an end to any relationship because how can love end the idea seems ludicrous improbable impossible and so in the stream that connects you and me and every being I pray you are safe and well and loved and inspiring people with your mere presence because that is the kind of person I remember you being the kind who made people around you better just by being near them what a blessing I was given to have you near me as I floundered and fell and learnt to fly and it was your push that gave me the wings I sought you became the wind beneath them as I took off and though I know I left you behind even when I promised I would return the only thing I can seek is forgiveness for leaving you holding our old book while I wrote myself a new one perhaps that’s also what love is the capacity to mould ourselves into different versions while retaining the parts of ourselves we want to keep and you were the best part of me because you brought me here

And nobody has ever given me a bigger gift.