When I look at you my chest clenches for I see the past--
The endless past, paradoxically atemporal in its existence.

Indeed, to look on an erstwhile lover eternally would be a most Dantean punishment.

***

As my fingers traced your divine architecture, I felt that I touched beauty incarnate.

But I may have idealized you as much as your beauty,
So much so that I may have been blind as Oedipus.

I saw you as the paragon of morality, pureness, piety,
You whose beauty complemented you so divinely.

Indeed, I called you the most beautiful woman I have ever seen,
For in you I saw a most sacred trinity of beauty--
The physical, intellectual, and spiritual,
Aligned in such harmony that God seemed not a distant truth.

Such is a judgment which now I am not inclined to revoke,
Yet I know not whether I was seeing you,
Or the form of beauty I imposed upon you,
That I wanted to see,
Did see,
Entirely believed.

I said I loved you.
But was my love catalyzed by my perception of beauty that I had discovered in you?
Did I love the idea of you more?

But what is love?
Laurencia says love is "a desire for beauty."
I may have been in love with your beauty,
But you?
I know not.