WHERE IS LOVE?

What name can be given to this love,

a breath without borders,

that crosses maps

as the wind crosses the skin,

without asking permission,

never pausing?

What force is this,

as ancient as the first human breath,

that unsettles the mind

and burns in silence,

as Sigmund Freud once intuited,

this desire that inhabits us

and undoes us from within,

invisible, insistent, inevitable?

What fate is this of the heart,

that learns to bleed in secret,

as if it had been torn from the chest,

wounded, shattered,

and yet returned

to an open body,

condemned to keep beating

between absence and hope?

And this image in the sky,

as ancient as the night,

the same for all peoples,

this silent promise

that love endures,

even when all seems lost,

and is sustained

by the delicate stubbornness of the infinite?

What flame is this,

so fragile and so immense,

the longing to be seen,

recognized in another’s gaze,

touched as one touches the meaning of life,

loved,

and, above all, desired?

Where are you,

sun of each day,

that illuminates and conceals

this truth that escapes us?

Where are you,

lost among distances,

among so many solitary souls

who feel the same emptiness

and call it by other names?

Where are you,

future love of my life?

Are you in the north,

among hills that guard their silence?

Or in the south,

in plains where time rests forgotten?

Do you walk along the shores of the Atlantic Ocean,

or do you dissolve into the waters of the Pacific Ocean?

Perhaps you breathe along the edges of the Mediterranean Sea,

or hide at the far reaches of the Indian Ocean,

the Arctic Ocean,

or the Antarctic Ocean?

Or perhaps you are here,

so close

that I have not yet learned to recognize you.

Or perhaps you are only

this absence that passes through me,

this waiting that sustains me,

this horizon that calls me.

I do not know yet,

but it is for you

that I go on…