Valentine's Day 2006

I am thinking clearly about love and affection for the first time in a while. At least, I think I'm thinking clearly.

Maybe there is no such thing as clear thinking on this subject.

I'm alone, as I usually have been on Valentine's Days past. And yet not alone, since in the more important sense, I'm as connected to the world sitting at my computer as I would be sitting at Lake Hefner watching the sunset with someone with whom I enjoyed being.

In these times when I am neither infatuated with someone nor recovering from rejection by someone, I have a difficult time seeing the value of love – at least that kind of love. Is it okay to ask 'What's the point?' – not as a setup for someone to burst into a Burt Bacharach/Hal David tune, but just as a question to be asked and answered on its own merit?

Oh, man, I shouldn't do this, but...

I once wrote this sort of free verse something-or-other to someone with whom I was very taken.

When you smile, when you laugh,
I am lost in a field of wildflowers and brilliant light.
I stretch out my arms and fall back
And let the tall grass and flowers catch me.

Light in your eyes, corners of your mouth,
tip of your nose, small of your back,
I have had the perfect week.

And she wrote back:

good morning Michael, this is beautiful...........

but, i'm wondering, are you sleeping enough?

And I saved that email, just as a reminder. A reality check.

That message would have been touching had it come from a lot of other men. Coming from me? Well, imagine you're watching a Rod McKuen biopic on Lifetime, and they've cast the Pillsbury Doughboy as McKuen.

And if I had the patience to go fetch them from the discarded hard drives piled up in my back bedroom, I could find other messages to other women, and similar responses from the recipients.

(Whatever else you may think about love, that Cyrano de Bergerac stuff is total crap – at least give me that. What really happened was that the winsome Roxanne discovered who wrote the letters, and then married Kevin Federline, anyway.)

I changed the ending of this. Right here, I had written something else. But it wasn't what I really should have written, and I don't know what I really should have written. After all these years, this stuff is still too complicated for me. I always manage to say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing – things that might be right for someone else, but don't come out right for me.

The safe, sane ground seems to be a place I'm occupying by myself.