The Shining Barrier

Sonnet CXVI
"Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. 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;
It is the star to every wondering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved."
-William Shakespeare

Love. It can not be neatly summed up or understood by the reading of words through a page. If we read of love all the time, but never taste it ourselves through experience, then we will never comprehend to what depths love can move. When I think of love, my heart shudders. My mind races with countless memories, and tears sting my eyes. The love I found was beautiful, was deep, was naive, was reckless, was a teacher- and under its tutelage I learned more in three years than under any other wise educator.
It has passed. As the blossoms of flowers and trees bloomed into erect tulips and sweet smelling umbrella's of shade, love resigned itself to a long bitter death. With one last sweet kiss on my wet cheek, my heart failed and the love that was sweeter than life itself bowed low, signaling the end of its passionate performance.
The 'Shining Barrier' at last yielded its walls, and in the rubble of the stones that I had undone with my own hands, I wept. I still weep. I love him still, and will for a long time more. My longing for him, for a love that can 'bear out even to the edge of doom' consumes me. Our love was not that fierce, our barrier not that strong. The strands binding us together were deep, but too few, and now they hang limp between us as time begins to first open the wound, and then in some far away time, heal it.