The Love Plague

As I turn the handle quietly and pop my head round to mouth goodbye, a finger shoots to his lips to warn me against speaking. There was a time when this gesture would have bothered me, the presumption that I'm a) not sensitive enough to know when speech maybe inappropriate and b) his shameless prioritisation of the woman at the end of the phone line. But it doesn't rile me. I wave goodbye, shut the door and descend the familiar cream carpeted stairs with its worn-in grey smudges. I am relieved and a little sad. Relieved that I play no part in his complicated triangles with girls who are engaged or cohabiting with another. Sad because this type of liaison is rife... spreading through the streets of London as quickly as the great plague of 1665; leaving in its wake bubonic hearts piled on top of each other, feebly beating their blood into the gutters and drains - seeping into our ecosystem, spreading, spreading... Love, if you can call it that, has become another victim of our careless, throw-away society. People are quick to fall into it, quick to fall out of it and think nothing of running a few different variants of it together... why? Do we think that keeping our options open will allow us to find as near to perfection as we can? Or do we do it simply because we live in an era where we can? A time where having your cake and eating it is a rite of passage? I don't know. But I want no part of it anymore. I do not want to be a variant of love for someone; I want to be their love. And I'm quietly confident that somewhere on this planet, there is a soul that thinks like me. That wants a simple yet complex love, exclusive, hardy - that will weather the test of time. A deep love which each party knows is worth fighting for even when surface love is temporarily sleeping because of strife or over-familiarity. I still believe that somewhere there is a man that wants that too.