Word of Ben and J-Lo’s breakup greeted me from the covers of the New York tabloids, while I savored my morning coffee at a soup café in North Bergen. “Bennifer” lasted a year and seven months, two months shy of the time I spent with my last girlfriend, a sweet and caring nurse. Since neither of us was famous, we failed to make the front pages when we split.
Strangely, news of the celebrity parting caused me to reflect fondly on the blissful world my girlfriend and I did share, during that precious but bounded swath of time the universe granted us. Our time. The cute headlines spread before me, like The Post’s: “They’re So Over,” by legitimizing the normalcy of breakups, made the memory of my own past love grow more solid.
And it made me wonder: in an age when serial relationships have become the norm, might it be time for a new vocabulary of love that reflects these changes? We need a brand new language that better names the gaps and spaces between love relationships, a landscape in which the memories of past love can whisper hopefully, like a rainbow, of the magic of love affairs yet to come. You’ve loved before, you’ll love again. Even if you’re enduring a “gap” while with someone dragging along the dead weight of a partner you’ve long stopped loving, memories of a past love, if you’re lucky enough to have had one, can keep hope alive.
Science can play a key role. Einstein explained time’s relativity, how it curves through black holes and slows down at great speeds, like those white-hot moments, frozen in time, when new lovers collide in a supernova of fresh passion. Many stars that twinkle the night sky with their beauty have, like old loves, in fact burned out eons ago. Yet they continue to enchant. Or think of the power of an ocean wave, which must curve out of the sea of memory, before it froths bubbling, the shore of your present. And we’ll invoke Mathematics, evolving past the boring linearity of Ozzie and Harriet to achieve a post-modern calculus of swirling possibilities. Let your love line plotted on the graph of life curve back past the y-axis first, where the negative numbers live: old loves who refuse to die, before looping onward and upward on cupid’s wings.
As time in the café bended toward lunch, I was comforted by the smells of the various soups heating up. The frigid January windows were fogged and glowing with late morning sunshine, silhouetting the cheerful red Valentine hearts just taped up by the nice girl who works the cafe. And the Elton John soundtrack continued to play, conjuring hope. “Can you feel the love tonight,” and, as if on cue to make my point, “The circle of life.” Not the boring straight line of life, where past love no longer resonates. The wondrous, curving circle of life. – John Bredin (The author is a Current contributor.)