Love that keeps on being postponed eventually loses all its shyness, as the momentum of stored-up longing stokes its own whirlpool, pressing innocence stormily against the walls of your heart, where — tired of waiting — it succumbs. The calm that takes hold of your heart after such a total surrender of need gathers together the leftovers of years of longing and preserves them in moments of heart, when your whole being becomes one with the moment and with whoever it may bring.

To test the validity of a postponed love, you do not hold it up to the thermometer of a heart warmly shut beneath the weight of passion and caring, even when the caring has rung empty and no longer stirs or feels deeply. You hold it up to the original commission of two hearts that beat so in tandem that you see two of them, but hear only one.

Because no feeling stronger than love is possible, hope, when it is put off, cleaves open its own path of longing to this oasis. And so the best part of love becomes the search, and the greater part, the hurt. And though your journey is sometimes very lonely, every lonely homecoming at love is, still, a welcome pause. For even in the welling up of compassion and care there is consolation — one that makes the meeting of more than one heart unnecessary.

And every wordless whispering that, in the end, sets its course for the heart becomes compost for a fertile landscape where love takes root easily. Love without hands anoints anyone who possesses it with tender and sweet sensations that, for a time, free the spirit from reality, while feelings greater than words or than the moment itself muffle your aloneness and, in mysterious confidence, put you at ease long after everyone has gone and the light has been turned out.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer