Winter Love

First the left and then the right, the softest touch of his lips.

He traced my face with his fingers, simply moving his fingers down my face, the lightest touch tracing down my jaw and across my chin and then upward to spread across my cheek bones until he had circumnavigated my face. He returned his finger tips to my lips, caressed and warmed my lips with a feathered touch, encircled them again and again before lowering his face to the pillow. Our noses touched and as we shared the single pillow I held my breath until I picked up his breathing to make it my own, and like that we breathed together, breathed as one.

We pulled the cord from the alarm clock on the night table, disconnected the telephone so that we might listen to the winter rain that snapped against the windowpane; we would hear it and nothing else, save our mutual murmurs. Our narrowing intimacies shivered across our skin.

Once I whispered to him that if I had one wish, it would be to hold him in my arms forever. That’s all. To embrace him forever and allow the scent from my skin to become the auto-intoxicant that would stay in his memory until the end of time.

There were times when I looked at him and wept tears of joy. Other times I sobbed with an emotion I had not know until now. I told him I wanted to disappear in him, be a part of him, make him a part of me. We are already that, I said, holding him close, but just a little bit more is what I need. I spoke quietly and I closed my eyes as I kissed his face and covered him with tears of longing.

I was just a college girl, and he, my professor He was my first love.

I never told him I worried constantly that I would one day lose him. I gave him every bit of me, I surrendered all I had to him, hoping he’d know how deeply I loved him.

By spring he had had enough of me. I monopolized him, he said. He couldn’t breathe, he said. I was devouring him, he said. I had taken everything from him, he said. He had nothing left to give, he said.

He returned my heart to me, but in pieces.

I left the university and went home to my Granny.

“You cannot love that way, child,” she told me, her eyes were sad, her face creased with lines of worry. “You cannot ever give yourself to a man so totally. What will be left of you for you if you give all of you to him?”

“But he told me he loved me, Granny. He said we had melded our hearts.”

“That’s winter-love talk, my sweet child, and winter-love is not lasting love. Winds blow and cold rain turns to ice and sometime a man’s heart will grow cold as winter itself,” she explained. “A man can grow afraid of a girl when her way of love raises its head.”

“He was my first love,’ Granny. “I miss him so.”

“Yes, I know, child. You were sweet on him. I know. I know.”

“Granny, he looked askance at me when he told me he didn’t love me anymore.”

“I’m sure he did, darlin.’ Most men fear love when a girl gives her love the way you gave your love. He feared your love because you delivered your heart to him without reservation. That scares men when a girl gives every bit of herself so fully, so completely.”

“But why, Granny? Why would he be afraid of my love?”

“Because your kind of love tells him of the power of girls. How strong they are to give themselves and their love unconditionally. If girls can do that, they can do anything. And that scares him.”

‘What do I do now, Granny?’

‘Sulfur and molasses, is what we do now, ‘cause that’s what we do when winter-love arrives. 

We chase it away with sulfur and blackstrap molasses, ‘cause spring love is true love and it always finds a girl as lovely as you. You can wait for it to arrive, darlin.‘”

My Granny explained that when she was a girl growing up in Kentucky her Granny had given her sulfur and blackstrap molasses as a tonic to redirect her winter-love, and to cure any further desire to envelop a man so completely by giving herself so totally; she must remember to keep a part of herself for herself always, and to be patient until her spring love arrives.

And not to forget that winter-love is nothing but a masquerade of true love.

- THE END -