Tonight I Can Write...

Ok, so I'm 19 and I'll be the first to admit, I've known love and what it's like to love someone and be loved in return. Don't get me wrong, however, I hope that I can love more than I have already, because there's so much more to learn but that which I have known was stupendous while it lasted.

Now, I normally don't like poems, stories, and movies about love. Life isn't as easy as they make them seem. Not everyone ends up happy. Somebody gets hurt. Nothing is ever happy and neatly contained. Snow White is twelve, Cinderella wasn't anything more than a girl who talked to animals that couldn't really talk back. Now, if you leave with a man older than you for a 'happy life' 9 times of 10 you get sold into slavery. Not a fairy tale in my book.

Tonight I Can Write..., however, shows us pain and suffering. He loved, she supposedly did, but left, and now he has to pick up the pieces. He goes back and forth on what really happened and how he really feels. I can imagine the tears falling on the page. This poem, when I read it, I feel my heart being ripped open. The last two lines however, "Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer and these the last verses that I write for her" (2443 Line 31), gives me hope for him. He's learning that it will be ok and that life will continue without her. To me, this is real life. He hurts really bad, but it will be ok.

In the end of the day if we look in a mirror, that mirror, in order to accurately represent ourselves, will not be a solid piece of glass. No one is perfect and without blemish or scars. No, that mirror will be whole, but will be cracked and pieced back together, be it by our own power or that of an outside source. Neruda, in this poem, took his broken mirror and is starting to put pieces of it together. He is healing. Not ignoring the fact that she took a huge chunk out of him. He is moving on. I am proud of him for that.