By Jlor 
Date: 27 July 1999

Can Someone Tell Me How to Change?

Once I was very in love,a love that filled my life with faith, and gave me magic sight. The very excitement and joy I felt put all those everyday petty cares to flight, so that my expectations spread like wild growth in a new springtime of first love after a whole cold, barren winter lifetime of solitude. Finally here were earth and heaven coming together to hail a new season to release me into a romance that for so long time had seemed like an underground pipe dream. Now the air around me was suddenly colored everywhere with delight. I was so in love with her that the rocks wept with springs and waterfalls bursting forth from under grottos and ravines lush with ferns, bushes and trees, water cascading every few feet along the way down the mountainside and from each overhanging rock by the road upon which we were driving to escape into our own love fantasy, only this was real: complete with clear streams by the road where salmon were spawning, and this show of Nature made me have to check my senses for whether I was really sitting in the presence of a flesh and blood woman in the carseat next to me, and ask myself in amazement how she could be in love with ME. I couldn't believe I had finally found my perfect world. Joy thinned out ego and bathed me in unaccustomed confidence in myself and the future. I was graced just to have her with me, secretly ecstatic when she stopped ever so often to kiss me in the bushes or by the side of a lake nearby. Just having her with me made my heart soar like the bald eagles flying overhead above the leafy wood surveying the dazzling effulgence of the clear turquoise water for a fish dinner to be carried home to their nearby nests in the crest of the evergreens, and they were hailing the sky with their cries as they returned to settle in with their mates after skimming a thousand trees to feed their chicks and roost for a while. But why am I now having to call up and live in these shades of past, summoning phantoms that feed on my sadness over a life whose changes have not transformed me for the better, because I've lived as a fool, fleeing mindlessly over a limited number of years; These changes are mournful, untempered as they are by no new love to guide me in spite of age. Life is worthwhile only if it has purpose. But my own lack of reason failed to produce in me the timely changes and insights one would expect in a middle aged man like me. One might think to find some wisdom by now, but it's not so. After years of existence, and now turning gray, I'm still a petulant, stupid little boy in an old man's body saluting the Moon as she brings me darkness each night in her arms with those phantoms following her, that have had their fill of promise: phantoms that make their rounds and bring forth only dug up ghosts of fond memories. I really hate living like this any longer, especially as death comes knocking more and more. I need a happy ending, feeling life again with a buoyant heart,launching dreams in a silver boat on a flood of promises with boundless kisses to give my lover and a heart that keeps those promises to her. I want to know: Can someone tell me the answer? How does an old fool become new inside, so that even in his foolishness and at his age, he can one more time fall in love again?
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