Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken . . .
--William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116
I struggle to memorize anything: words, music, directions.
The only way I remembered melodies when I played the flute in high school was through my body. Each note connected to a footstep, a spot on the football field as I marched in formation. Only then could my fingers flit across silver keys without interference from my brain.
For some reason, however, these lines from Sonnet 116 stuck in my ear the first time I heard them, perhaps because of their musicality--and physicality. I recited them just to relive how my tongue caressed velvet vowels even as my lips chopped consonants into syllabic shapes equaling five iambs per foot. The combined actions stitched the words’ meaning to my mind.
It helped that each sentence reinforced a teenage notion of romantic love: one that remains unchanged—pure and fixed—regardless of what it encounters. That was the love I sought. I marched toward it one step at a time, certain I'd find it just around the next bend.
In middle age, I immerse myself in words. I swim in them for pleasure: reading, writing, listening, talking, thinking, feeling. Words. I teach their descant in the classroom. There, I reunited with Sonnet 116 only to find my love of it . . . altered.
Its music still trills in my ear, lolls sweetly in my mouth. But years of exposure have leached the melody from its message. Love that refuses to change even as life and its live-ers do, I ask myself, Is that really what I want?
No.
I’m no longer the girl whose eyes cast dreamily on a distant mirage--that white castle on a hill--while the photographer imprinted her 7th grade essence and fixed it with a glossy sheen.
Love that remains an “ever-fixed mark” anchors a person to the past. It binds, prevents growth or movement. Neither giver nor receiver can stretch, or, eventually, even breathe.
If my husband’s love remained as it emerged when he pledged partnership to a slip of a girl trying desperately to imitate Aubrey Hepburn, we’d have suffocated by now. That girl tiptoed footsteps ahead of an eating disorder that consumed everything in its roiling path.
A decade later, the white dress no longer zips past the curve of my lower back. I’ve expanded in size, but also in confidence and contentment. I’ve reentered my body. I've settled comfortably into its cushions.
A sharper focus defines my 41-year-old gaze. Experience tints my irises a darker blue, frames my lids with crackled lines. My eyes and I have developed texture, as has our view of love.
I’ve embodied its many genres: familial, spousal, collegial. Neighborly, nostalgic. Protective, possessive. Distant. Traumatic. Therapeutic. Elastic.
All have been imperfect.
All have taught me something.
All have altered when they alteration found. And for that, I remain grateful.