If I Should Think Of Love

“If I should think of love,

I’d think of you." ~William Shakespeare

I scrawled those words on the bathroom mirror over my husband’s sink many days ago.  I looked up at them again today to find the dry erase ink has melted the letters into something fit for Halloween – a font fit for the Goosebump novels – as countless showers have been taken since the time I wrote them, the steam and condensation doing a number on the original message.  If you look hard though, and squint just one of your eyes, you will find the original message still there. I think that’s why he hasn’t wiped it off yet.

I have this curse in my passion for literature that I discover things as I study and read: poetry, prose, letters, devotions, stories – things written for lovers that have stood the test of time, lasted through centuries, escaped fires, natural disasters, plagues, and remain to this day, a testament of emotions that ran so deep that when the author wrote about them, they became permanent.  Their love became enduring, everlasting, endless – right there in black and white for centuries upon centuries to read.

So I wonder, as I write, if anything I ever say about my love will stand the test of time. Does my love diminish or mean less if I can’t create a sonnet suited for Shakespeare’s audiences?  Does pain have to be associated with love for it to evoke the emotions that run so deep that poets praise it? Was it a different life? A different time? What made it so poignant?

I find myself wondering, did they ever nurse their sick wife back to health?  Did they ever stand at their husband’s bed side counting the breaths because the medicine sedated him so deeply, you wondered if he had died? Did they lose a child? Or hold hands as they brought a child into this world? Did he lift his wife off the floor and wrap her in his arms trying to squeeze the grief of losing a loved one out of her body and into his own, because he would do anything to take the pain away?  And I think: of course they did. Don’t we all?

Maybe we don’t do it in the way that poetry writes, but we choose love.  We choose hope. Love is a verb. I recently read a quote by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland about love that said, “It does not come without effort and it does not come without patience…true love booms when we care more about another person than we care about ourselves.” I would add that when that same level of care is reciprocated back to us.

So I feel love the same way the poets did.  I just haven’t mastered how to write about it yet.  It’s there, though, I can assure you.  I feel it in the dark of night flowing from my husband’s steady arms that surround me, like osmosis occurs between our bodies, and the love transfused between he and I where our skin touches.  I feel it in the way he tucks my hair behind my ear when I am crying to look me in the eyes and offer comfort. I feel it in the way his soul silently sends mine a message that feels like, “I am here. I will not leave you. You will always be my first priority.”  I smell it through fall flowers he gifts to me for no reason at all.  I feel it deep in my chest when my lungs are struggling for air because my chest is heavy with laughter.

I feel it, I just don’t write about it as well as the greats. As well as Shakespeare, but I mean it and feel just as he did….

“But were you in my arms, dear love,

The happiness would take my breath away,

No thought could match that ecstasy,

No song encompass it, no other worlds.

If I should think of love,

I’d think of you."